Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E430 14" Business Notebook PC - 6271-56U

The 13.3" screen laptop weighing less than 5 lbs. are the ideal dimensions for a business laptop. A few years ago, there were a number of business and consumer laptops with these dimensions selling for $500-700. However, with Apple's success with the MacBook Pros, other PC manufacturers started copying Apple with higher priced ultrabooks. Now, it is practically impossible to find a 13.3" notebook that costs less than $1,000. This leaves the folks pinching pennies with the less than ideal 14" notebooks.

I have owned this laptop for a few days and I have listed some of my observations. I will update this review if I find any glaring deficiencies.

With stock parts, the machine scored 2,200 on the PC Mark 7 and a 5.0 on the Windows Experience Index (WEI). The graphics performance on Windows Aero was the lagging metric on WEI at 5.0.

Pros:

1. Intel i5-3210M Processor – It might be the slowest i5 processor in the market right now but it's still good. It should run most office applications with aplomb.

2. Size and weight – The size and weight of this laptop is just right (almost). It has a 14" screen that has a maximum screen resolution of 1366x768 (720p). It weighs 4.7 lbs so you can carry it or lug it along your bag without too much effort.

3. Expandability – It has a PCI Express Mini Card free. This gives the users the option of adding an mSATA drive to improve the laptop's performance. After adding a Plextor 64GB mSATA SSD, the scores jumped to 3,700 on the PC Mark 7. The main WEI score stayed the same at 5.0 but the Hard Disk score was significantly improved at 7.8 from 5.9. Users can also expand the memory to 16GB (according to the Lenovo software) and the hard disk. For some reason, Lenovo only offers the 1TB drives at 5,400 rpm. I believe it was a technical decision to keep the laptop cool.

4. Price – It may be last year's model, but the performance and value are really at a sweet spot. You will be hard pressed to find another laptop with the same price/performance at less than $600.

5. Good documentation – Lenovo provides a Hardware Maintenance guide to help users upgrade their laptop. It is a pretty comprehensive guide that even shows users how to replace the LCD and motherboard.

Cons:

1. Ctrl and Fn keys are switched – This is not a big deal though since you can switch the keys in the BIOS.

2. Some LED indicators are missing – For some reason the hardware engineers at Lenovo decided to ditch some of the indicator lights. There are no indicator lights for Caps Lock, wifi and the Hard Disk. In fact, the only lights that you will see are the small red lights indicating power on and a small green light on the right side indicating battery charging.

3. Relatively low memory and Hard Disk space This is also not a big deal because of the low price and good documentation. Instead of configuring the laptop on the Lenovo website, you can just buy a prepackaged one and upgrade it at a lower cost. Upgrading this laptop on your own should take a few hours at most.

4. No Windows 7 media – Users need to make a copy of the Windows 7 recovery disks on DVD or a thumb drive. In addition, there's a lot of documentation on the web showing how to write your own Windows 7 copy on DVD or USB. Lenovo provides recovery disks for Windows 8.

I upgraded the memory to 8GB with Kingston HyperX sticks and the Hard Disk to 1 TB with a Toshiba hard disk. The final benchmarks with all the modifications are 4,300+ on PC Mark 7 and 6.5 on the Windows Experience Index. The 30% increase in Windows Aero performance indicates that the stock 4GB in memory may be too low and was affecting graphics performance. Overall, I find this laptop to be a solid value buy. It is a 4-star laptop at stock but a potential 5-star machine with the right upgrades.

it is not as perfect as I thought before.

some noisy!!

be sure to pay attention to the place of "Ctrl", "Fn" and "PrtSc" buttons. its not as usual.

also, you need to press "Fn" button to activate F1 to F12 buttons!!! that's awful!!

look at the youtube links about this product.

but overall, its price is low and it is not a heavy laptop.

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