What is Lenovo's build quality like?

[Daniel_324]

Hi everyone, I'm a university student studying game design, so I use the adobe suite and 3ds Max a lot. I'm looking into getting a laptop as live with my parents and commute in every day, (a 40-50 minute journey). The laptop needs to be small and light as well as powerful so currently I am thinking of going with the Lenovo Yoga 510 with the i7-6500U, 8GB RAM, 258GB SSD and Radeon R5 M430 for £630. However, I have my reservations as I had a Lenovo laptop about 3 years ago which only lasted for 9 months as it got so hot the heat vents melted/weakened the glue holding the body together. I saw on a previous post that Lenovo is the 4th best laptop brand up 11 places from 2015 according to Laptop Mag, but I was hoping to hear some real world experiences with their laptops.

Thanks in advance,

Dan.

P.S. If anyone has any suggestions for other laptops to look for up to around £700 please feel free to post.

 

[Purpletalon55]

Dan,
Lenovo is one if the best really good quality had one problem cause I bumped edge of my t440 into a door and it cracked they mailed me and box and 8am the next day laptop was back good as new. Lenovo hands down has fastest repair service I've ever seen. Because you are going to be using a lot of intensive software save some money up and look at P40 Yoga it's a lightweight 14 inch laptop designed for the tasks you will be doing and it's touchscreen as well.

 

[MusenMouse]

I haven't had any issues with my Lenovo y550 that I bought 4 years ago, and I put quite a few hours on it. Lot of people at my work used to opt for Lenovo even though we were supposed to be buying HP's.

 

[Purpletalon55]

Simply put lenovos are reliable and simple the best laptops for business and really anything now, but if I buy a laptop for school and stuff I would buy a thinkpad solely for the fact that they have amazing battery life my t440 manages like 9-10 hours on its 2 batteries with a i5 4300u it uses less energy than a damn lightbulb.

 

[jaguarskx]

Lenovo's ThinkPad series business oriented laptops have very good build quality. But their lower end Thinkpads (<$600) are probably just a bit better than average. The T series is very well known for their ruggedness. I have an old IBM ThinkPad T40 from 2003 (before IBM sold their desktop and laptop division to Lenovo) that still functions today. Too bad it is no longer powerful enough to simply surf the internet.

Lenovo's consumer laptops (any laptop that is not called "ThinkPads") probably varies from below average to good depending on the model. For example, the Y50-700 is pretty well known for having hinges that can break under normal usage. I have a Lenovo IdeaPad Y470 that was purchased in 2011. It worked fine for around 18 months (no longer under warranty) before the nVidia GT 550m started to fail intermittently before finally finally failing after about 2 years. At around 3 years either the Windows 7 recovery partition got corrupted or Lenovo's One Touch Windows Recovery Tool was corrupted because I could not do a clean install of Windows 7. Fortunately, I had a retail copy of Win 7 for my desktop. I used that and the Windows 7 product key on the sticker underneath the laptop to reinstall Windows 7.

 

[Purpletalon55]

Jaguar, probably because lenovo is new to gaming laptop market. So they haven't worked out kinks yet

 

[jaguarskx]

Jaguar, probably because lenovo is new to gaming laptop market. So they haven't worked out kinks yet

Not really a valid reason in my opinion.

All laptops have hinges that connects the screen and the rest of the laptop. The exception would be most 2-in-1 laptops with detachable keyboards. If people are having problems with hinges in the Y50-70 and Y700 laptops, then that indicates a poor design.

Not sure what the problem was with the GT 550m, it could be a bad chip or general manufacturing problems. Then again, Lenovo does not manufacture their own laptops like most other brands. The ThinkPad T40 has a Radeon 7500 dedicated GPU and it still works. I think that was a $150 option when I purchased my ThinkPad which itself was very expensive.... I think it cost me around $2,500. - $2,600.

As for the failed / corrupted Windows 7 Install partition / One Touch software.... I have no idea. I tested the hard drive after and found no errors on it. I deleted the Win 7 install partition and formatted the HDD sometime back in 2014. I haven't experienced any problems with the HDD since then.

 

[Purpletalon55]

I have spoken to lenovo reps and they informed me that they manufacture machines

 

[jaguarskx]

Lenovo does not manufacture their own laptops. Lenovo has agreements with the following companies (not a complete list) that manufactures laptops for them.

Quanta
Compal
Winstron (a former division of Acer)
Inventec


I think Lenovo has a contract with Quanta for their data centers.

 

[ravi.inajar]

I can't speak to the ThinkPad line but I can say a few words about the IdeaPads. The keyboard and trackpad are flimsy - the trackpad borders on unusable. It is nowhere near the same league as a Mac trackpad. My laptop has a fault where the OS freezes - it has had this fault since I bought it 6 months ago so I also have a lot of experience with Lenovo service and repair centre. Their service is absolutely awful. If anything serious goes wrong with your laptop under warranty, you could possibly not have a working laptop for many months (my laptop is still at their repair centre after 6 months). They do not know how to fix my issue but they believe that by having me keep sending it in for repair (where they send it back unfixed each time) they are honouring the warranty. In my opinion they are in breach of the warranty but I'd have to appeal to an independent adjudicator to get a decision on that and they are refusing to explain the escalation process to me and won't let me speak to a manager or anyone who isn't just a puppet. In the meantime I have had to buy another computer as I need it for my business - so I have lost a lot of money. My particular laptop is an Ideapad 320 with an 8th generation i7 chip, 258GB SSD and intel graphics. I paid £650 for it which I've had to write off. I believe the Yoga that you are thinking of buying also has a reputation for random OS freezes (try a google search). This issue has no known solution as yet. If that happens to you, you will wish you had spent more money on a decent brand.