| I bought a higher end Lenovo in 2014 before carrying it around the world for a year while backpacking. It has by far had the best real-world performance of any laptop I've interacted with. (Model: T440s) The keyboard is a dream, the touchpad is excellent, the hardware is magnificent and a breeze to take apart and maintain. Every time I crack it open (one panel bottom assembly for easy access), I discover some neat piece of engineering I missed the last time. Like the pinhole in the bottom that leads to a button to manually disconnect the internal battery. And it's durable. It survived a year in my backpack, and I didn't go easy on it. Water damage? What water damage? You can pour a glass of water on the keyboard and it just goes out through to the bottom. Oh, and you can replace that same keyboard in a matter of minutes thanks to a well designed locking system and easy internal access. I SLEPT on my backpack with this thing inside and it didn't notice. Banged it up countless times. A bit of heavy condensation eventually made its was into the edges of the screen from the sweat off my back in tropical summer weather, and eventually there were a few tiny pin marks on the screen from considerable external pressure (eg. third world buses and my pack getting thrown around and dropped from the roof). I found them easy enough to overlook given what I've put it through. As for performance, I've been a PC nerd my whole life and the first thing I did when I was a teenager and had a few dollars was build a PC. I'm the sort who overclocks and notices those few extra MHz on my CPU, or that the RAM and storage aren't bottlenecking anything. The laptop runs smooth as butter (I put an SSD in and reinstalled Windows the moment I got it). It's two years later, so I don't know how their laptops are currently doing, but give the higher end Lenovos a look if you want quality (and performance). Their cheap ones are crap though; you get what you pay for. |