Y450: First thoughts review - UPDATED with painful info

[Antioch]

Well, my wife's Y450 came today. Finally! Actually, the wait was not very long. I ordered it on 5/22, was quoted a ship-by date of 5/28, and had the machine actually ship on 5/27. it only just came today, 6/1, as my shipment got delayed by the weekend. Interesting side note: the machine shipped from Greensboro, North Carolina - quite different than the China I'm used to getting ThinkPads from.

Speaking of being used to ThinkPads - the cardboard box that housed the IdeaPad box was normal cardboard. My ThinkPads have always been encased in a double-ply outer box *shrugs*. The contents of the IdeaPad box are rather Spartan. The machine, a battery, the power cord, and some useless papers (for tech savvy people at least).

I've only just started using the machine - poking around at the preload software and making recovery disks before I wipe it all and install Win7 RC. The build is pretty solid. I like the white status LEDs. The LCD quality is a step up from my X61s, but I don't prefer the gloss (LED backlighting is welcome though).

The most interesting thing about the machine is when you first turn it on. The BIOS plays a relaxing little music riff (which can be disabled) when you boot, and the touch-sensitive shortcut bar's lights bounce back and forth for a moment. There isn't really much of anything you can change in the BIOS aside from the boot order and admin passwords.

The machine is relatively quiet. The fan stayed off for a while until I started the Vista preload setup routines. Then it kicked up a notch, but is only as loud as my X61s idles at. I can hear the HD twitter if I place my ear next to it - it is under the right palm rest.

Speaking of which, the first thing I did upon opening the box was to take off the HD cover and examine the disk. To my surprise Lenovo seems to be using Western Digital Scorpio Blue drives. I was satisfied with that - especially at the price I paid.

I'd have to say the feature I MOST appreciate about the machine is its silence. The T60 and X61s I have both emit a high-pitch screeching noise when I use the machines. I thought it was isolated to my T60, but then when my X61s arrived it had the same problem. I had Lenovo give me a new machine but the sound remained. I had decided that Lenovo was too cheap to produce quality PCBs and as a result had noisy circuitry. This really upset me, especially when using friend's cheap Dells that did not have any such problem. So, to my delight this Y450 seems to be free of that horrible screeching sound. I'm really glad about it because I can now look forward to purchasing an X201s or an X302 without fear of that horrendous noise.

The last thing I can comment on is the keyboard. touchpad, and palmrest. The keyboard is comfortable to type on. It doesn't feel the same as my ThinkPad keyboards, but is by no means any worse. It has a different sound, however. I can't describe it except to say that its more "hollow". The touchpad seems to track fine. I haven't used touchpads in a while, but I always had to deal with the issue of warm/sweaty fingers and bad tracking. So far I haven't had any issues. When I first purchased the machine I was fearful of the palmrest turning brown like those bad old MacBooks do. I believe this machine won't succumb to the same fate. There seems to be a nice solid finish on the palmrest made of a different type of plastic than the MacBooks. The Macs were more porous and rubbery - this is more solid and, well, glossy. However, only time will truly tell.

I'm sorry I don't have any of my own unboxing shots. My camera is out of service at the moment. However, here is a link to another fellows shots. Note: he has the top of the line model which comes with a slot-loading optical drive - none of the other models do. http://profile.imageshack.us/user/switch719/

Enjoy!

:::UPDATE:::

So it seems that the IdeaPad division are real PITAs. Unlike with ThinkPads you cannot create system recovery disks to restore the HD to a fresh factory image. You can only restore backups that you have made by hand. These backups do not restore the factory preloaded recovery partition. So, if you lose your recovery partition you cannot restore it without sending the machine in and having Lenovo do it for you. They won't mail the disks to you even if you ask.

Why? Well, according to the tech rep I spoke with it's because "This is the IdeaPad division, not the ThinkPad division - it's how we do things. We don't want customers to have those images. We save money by not making recovery disks and by having you send your machine to us to reimage." Yes - that sounds very economical.

I then asked him why I can't make the images myself. He told me that you can, but he was only referring to system backup images, not the entire preload and recovery area images. He kept talking in circles.

Shame on you Lenovo. This is a terrible move. I fail to see how not allowing users to create their own recovery disks of the entire machine saves money. Honestly. This really upsets me and will prevent me from every buying or recommending an IdeaPad again.

The only solution I can see is to use the OneKey Recovery system to put the machine into a factory preload state, plug the HD into my desktop and use Acronis to make an complete disk image. What a waste of 160GB of space.

I spit on thee, IdeaPad division - and I praise thee, Acronis.

[phr]

I suspect they have to pay microsoft more if they let you make recovery discs, since the recovery discs could then be used to transplant the OS to additional machines.

[Varu]

Let us all hope that the http://ReactOS.org project makes some progress. They're creating an open source clone of Windows NT.

[y450lenovoideapad]

Check other reviews here Lenovo Y450 IdeaPad it is pretty good though

[Norway Pad]

I ordered a S10-2 as a christmas present for my self, and I also noticed that there was no option for ordering Recovery discs along with this one. So the plan is to make a Clonezilla image before I do any installs or change any settings. So I can restore it to Day 1 state if ever needed. But when I imaged my T43, the size of the image file was equal to the size of the contents on the HDD, and not the size of the entire HDD. A 160GB image file would be a problem, as I would need to buy a USB drive to store it..