Lets start with I have owned many Thinkpads in the past and i think they are the best machines out there. I picked this up at Fry's this weekend for $479. Wanted something that would play some games that I have laying around. Was skeptical of the AMD Fusion series. I own a x120e that has the fusion and that Thinkpad does a good job for what it is but just barely. After testing and updating the machine it has three downfalls.
1) The hard drive is slow but on the flip side its 750GB.
2) The keyboard layout is not great. They keys are fine but the layout is cramped and I'm constantly hit the wrong keys. I would have preferred they remove the 10 key and spaced the whole keypad out better.
3) The AC adapter is not a straight plug but a small L shape and has the EMI thing right by the plug. Its a terrible design and gets snagged on anything. That and its right crammed up by the USB port. I like the AC adapter plugins on the back side of machines personally.
Overall the fit and finish is typical Lennovo which is very good. The Screen is clear and not bad for glare and folds back almost flat which I like. Its not a light machine but not super heavy either(under 6lbs). The track-pad is nice, not great but not bad. There is no track-point on the Ideadpad which for some is no big deal, I personally like having it.
The machine runs fast and seems faster than my Dell Lattitude I5 that I use at work. Overall a solid buy. Its fast and has killer graphics that blow away the Intel integrated. If you need raw CPU then move to a Intel CPU. I'm not biased by Intel or AMD they all have their spot in the marketplace.
Just got this laptop today via UPS. I also purchased mine from Frys for $479 (sorry Amazon!).
Likes :
Nice finish. The casing of the computer itself as well as the back of the monitor has a nice brushed metal sheen to it, but isn't overly shiny.
I have large-ish hands and the keyboard seems spaced very well to me with a couple of exceptions. I seem to keep missing the backspace key since it's a tad small, but that's really about it. I think that having a numberpad though outweighs the small gripe I have with the backspace key.
Pretty fast for a laptop. I have a Phenom II X6 1100T based desktop, so I wasn't expecting it to be as fast as my desktop, but it seems to keep up nicely. Windows transition quickly, and everything loads pretty fast. I suspect that if you bought this and swapped out the hard drive for an SSD this thing would blaze.
It's light gaming capable. You're not going to get crazy fps on newer games, but on some older games it works like a champ (Left4Dead 2, other Source games, etc). I went with this machine over similarly priced Intel based alternatives for this reason alone. My daughter likes to take over my desktop, so the option of playing some games against her from my laptop is pretty much why I bought it.
Dislikes :
Not a whole lot to not like at this point. My only observation thus far is that there seems to be quite a bit of heat kicking out the side vent, but the keyboard area and bottom stay relatively cool so I'm assuming that the cooling solution in place is doing a rather nice job of expelling the heat.
I would say that if you can find this laptop in the $470 to $550 range it's a great buy, but the current price of $650 to $750 seems a tad high as you can get some similarly specced ultrabooks with low end discrete graphics in that price range.
Buy Lenovo IdeaPad Z585 261729U 15.6-Inch Laptop (Grey Metal) Now
I ordered on Thursday, shipped on Friday and delivered on the Monday (Fast free shipping). It was packaged really well and secure. I have currently had it for a little over 2 weeks.
I have only 2 negative items on this laptop, that keeps me from calling it perfect (4 1/2 stars not 5 intended):
1.) The manual useful and in only 1 local language (this is the good part). The bad, not enough details in the manual or literature, the worst was the lack of description about the optical drive, i.e. what type of disc formats are acceptable? (Yep, I still use my optical drive on a daily basis.)
2.) BloatwareChrome pre-installed!? (IBM/Lenovo, must be getting funds from google, ok, if it keeps down cost of product, supposedly?) Why not just use a desktop icon to install/not install option? I like other Chrom-ium based browsers, minus the spyware. If IBM/Lenovo & google want a pre-installed program, why not Picasa (much better) or something else instead? OK, enough of the rant of the negative (not too bad overall). ;)
Onto the positive (much more and better):
1.)AMD A_Series_Quad_Core_A10_4600M Processor 2.3GHz turbo boosts up to 3.2GHz (I WAS a long time user of PCs' with Intel processors, but since my first AMD processor (Desktop) mid-2010, I have never looked back. Comparing apples to apples, the AMDs' load the OSs' much quicker and overall much-much snappier opening/running proggies, hands down!
2.)6 GB DIMM RAM DDR3=more than enough!
3.)750GB 5400rpm HDD (The biggest I had seen for a laptop...until the updated version of this laptop 1TB HDD(10-12-12 amazon w/Win 8, but 200 bones more?)
4.)15.6-Inch Backlit LED HD display=beautiful!
5.)AMD Radeon HD 7660G graphics=awesome
6.)720p HD webcam+bluetooth+2xUSB 3.0
7.)Dolby Home Theatre v4=exceptional sound for a laptop.
8.)A Lenovo program to boost start-up time+a program for making backup or snapshots(Discs/Images)of the OS.
9.)IBM/Lenovo is ranked very high on various Linux sites, for high compatibility to various Linux distros (in this regard, Dell,Acer/Gateway and HP are noted as well with good results. ;)
10.) A nice full and roomy touch/track pad, very comfortable.
11.) Battery15 minutes to do a full charge, for 5 to 6 hours of usage=good stuff.
12.)Of all the various laptops, I have used/tried before, this Lenovo is really solid and sturdy. In fact the only other one I can think of that felt more solid/sturdy, was a Panasonic brand laptop, from a few years back, but it was built extra rugged, even for in a combat situation.
13.) The look of the lid/back of the screen, in a word "cool". It has a brushed metal, medium2dark lavender (The descript. says "Gray Metal".) look to it, unique and nice.
14.) The fan is very quiet and Lenovo added a program to run the fan in a "maintenance mode" to clean any dust out. Nice touch.
15.) TemperatureThe keyboard area and the bottom, stay very cool to touch. The main vent area (left side), only when really pushing it really hard (intense graphic games and video editing+over a dozen other proggies running browser/flash, MS office, email, messaging,video chat, etc.), the vent area gets only slightly (I do mean slightly.) warmer than room temperature. Very nice!
16.) 15 bones refund Visa card (Win 8).
17.) Optical drive-burns at good to excellent speeds (I have only used DVD+R, thus far)
18.) Keyboard-perfect for composing letters, documents or whatever. Overall it is great (for me anyway).
Summary: For a 500 bones laptop, it is very impressive, solid built, a real "workhorse", fast, more than efficient and high quality. The best thing, I can say about this Lenovo product is, IBM/Lenovo now has 1 more built in future customer. Keep up the great work and high quality. Cheers and enjoy. :)
Read Best Reviews of Lenovo IdeaPad Z585 261729U 15.6-Inch Laptop (Grey Metal) Here
Just got this laptop (will update after a couple of days, weeks, month etc.) for school use and light gaming and video editing. I was immediatly surprised by the build quality on this thing. It's AMAZING. Full metal brushed aluminum (or whatever material) lid. Metal sidings look very durable, the bottom is plastic but thats fine. Also, it is a very purpleish reddish brown gray color. Not really plain gray like the pictures suggest. Also I found the layout of the keyboard to be weird at first. They merge the shift button and the up arrow together so that the shift button is only as wide as say the control key (a bit wider than normal keys, but not the normal inch and a half that im used to). When normally typing, I only hit the far left half inch (which this shift key only is), but sometimes when editing documents I'll press the up key instead of shift and it gets annoying. Funny how the left shift is full sized. The keyboard is a great keyboard in my opinion. The keys feel almost macbook pro like and have good spacing between them. The number pad is really squished and I wish they had cut it off and spread out the rest of the keyboard out. Maybe they could have put the same A10 and all the internal components in a 14 inch form factor. The first boot up was a bit over a minute, but the lenovo boot optomizer thing automatically started up and made the next restart only 45 seconds and then the next 40 seconds. Very cool stuff. When I close the lid, it almost immediatly goes to sleep, and then when i open it up it almost immediatly wakse up and shows the locked/log in screen.
The screen is moderately good. I'm used to 17 inch laptop or 11-13 inch screens so it was a change for me. It looks fine. When you tilt it up or down or side ways, it loses contrast and looks all weird. IT is definitely the IPS fancy HD macbook screen. It's pretty low res at 768p. I just did a windows experience index check and it got 6.9 processor
6.9 memory (RAM)
6.2 graphics (windows aero)
6.2 gaming graphics
5.9 HDD (pretty normal, all HDDs non solid state get this score mostly)
The 6.7 and 6.9 are very good scores and this laptop should preform very well for my gaming and video/photo editing needs. I'm downloading some of my video games at the moment (TF2, Portal, Assassin's creed, Battlefield Bad companty 2) and my editing software, adobe production premium CS6. I'm going to try and hack after effects into supporting the openCL acceleration from the AMD 7660m/A10. Will update and tell how it works.
The trackpad felt a bit awkward at first, it is very far to the left. IT would be perfect if the laptop were 14 inches and they cut off the number pad, but with the num pad it is too far to the left. When typing I sometimes hit the top corner of it. Will change the trackpad settings later to prevent this.
My first impressions are very good. This laptop is excellently built, should be very fast, and is a great price (bought it for under 600 dollars a steal! ($550)).
The speakers are also really good which i didnt expect.
It certainly isnt lightweight (not an ultrabook, lol) but its a great laptop for the price. I might suggest looking at the Lenovo Y480 if its in stock anywhere. Saw it going for only 600 bucks on newegg a couple days ago (now out of stock) which is a great deal. a pound lighter than this, better dedicated graphics, quad core i7 (i believe) and a 14 inch screen.
EDIT:
Upon downloading a couple of games and programs I can say this laptop is awesome! It plays Team Fortress 2 at high/very high/ultra settings with maxed out anti aliasing and filtering 16x smoothly at ~60-100fps I'd say. It boots up super fast (under a minute consistantly, more like 45 seconds). When running after effects, I can make use of all four cores and have it render multiple frames simultaneously, with 1gb of ram for each core. I will soon upgrade to 8gb of ram. Not sure if I can go as high as 16gb or 12gb or whatever. I also plan on taking out the optical drive and replacing it with a solid state drive to speed the system up even more.
I can't emphasize it enough, for the money this is a great laptop and is everything that I needed. Excellent build quality, great gaming preformance, and portability.
Want Lenovo IdeaPad Z585 261729U 15.6-Inch Laptop (Grey Metal) Discount?
You get an unbelievable amount of technology for a very reasonable price. Most laptops with these specs cost twice as much. Very fast and the graphics are quite good. Build quality seems very good and every thing operates as it should. Am very pleased with this purchase.
This Laptop is everything you would expect It to be. Giving that your expectations are good. I've read some reviews and everyone seemed to hate this laptop. I love it, I've had it for maybe a week now and nothing has gone wrong so far.
