Lenovo G 580

Recently I purchased a Lenovo G580. It cost me INR 25000 after INR 1000 discount. The configuration is as follows: Pentium B950 @2.1GHz. Its a Sandy Bridge core which translates to cooler temps. We have 2GB RAM here. Added to it is a 500GB Seagate HDD, A DVD Burner, 3 USB ports out of which one is USB3.0. We have Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, 1.3M webcam, Synaptics touchpad which is embedded in the body. We have both VGA Out as well as HDMI Out and I think that's a neat feature since finding HDMI projector around is still kind of difficult. Sure you can use an adapter but that's another piece of hardware you need with yourself.

The chassis is solid, the display has barely any flex. The hinges are not as stiff as I would like - my emachines e727 has really stiff hinges, you feel like trying to pry a ball from a German Mastiff's mouth, but maybe that's why it's still alive and kicking some major dust. On sound front it has stereo speakers which sound a bit better than average laptop speakers, they are located on the front downside. The 3 status LED's Power, Charging and Caps Lock are on front face right below the touchpad. The touchpad is aligned to center of keyboard and is comfortable to use. The keyboard is excellent. It doesnt have asmuch travel as my emachines but still it's nice and the keys are lot sturdier. They feel much better to fingers and felt comfortable to type on this. The keys are island type and Lenovo calls it AccuType keyboard. I don't know how much accutype this is, since I'm not a touch type guy. But it sure feels like a quality keyboard. The touchpad has separate left and right click keys and they are a bit hard clicking. On the other hand the keyboard has full numpad and full size arrow keys which I really love.

It has a Power button on upper left corner and a small Lenovo One Touch recovery button right next to it. The webcam is centered on top bezel edge of display and it has a white LED that glows when it's on. The 15.6" LCD is just average. It has decent brightness but the viewing angles - especially vertical - suck really bad. They almost match that of my emachines. The notebook is available in Navy Blue, Dark Brown and Dark Gray color. I went with Navy Blue since I wanted it to look catchy.

Performance wise the sandy bridge Pentium B950 is more than enough for almost every everyday task. Also since the target audience - My Sister - is not going to use it for any intensive task I'm not worried about performance. I have partitioned the HDD into 4 partitions.I used two of them for Linux - one swap and one root partition, the remaining two went to windows 7 and Data. I encountered one small problem with this and that was Windows 7 was unable to create any extended partitions on this and it was unable to read the extended partitions by Linux. I didn't think of this before but it came with DOS by default and I didn't wipe out the existing partition table. I did delete the partitions but I should have wiped out the partition table too.

Anyway I have the system working fine right now so I'm not going to worry about anything. Overall it's a really nice machine with great VFM and good hardware quality.