Lenovo T500 With Windows 7 Reviewed

I have been a loyal customer at Dell buying their laptops and workstations without too many questions being asked. However, when I was in the market for a new business style laptop I was shocked to see how bad Dell was doing. The Latitude 6500 is just a bad laptop. It looks cheap and according to the reviews on Dell's website the laptops are cheap in quality, too. Since I work a lot on my laptop I cannot afford much downtime due to bad hardware. I need something that is reliable and Dell just did not give me a warm, fuzzy feeling with their current line of business laptops. So, instead I ordered a Lenovo T500 business laptop.

The order process was a bit cumbersome as I wanted a Windows 7 Lenovo laptop and Lenovo was a little slow in updating their website. But when everything was in place I even found a 10% off coupon on top of a special Windows 7 pricing offer and in the end I probably saved roughly 0 or more on the new laptop. The new laptop arrived 6 days after ordering it even though the website had shown a 13 day delivery.

Lenovo Notebook

After unpacking the laptop the only thing missing was a restore media. Apparently they do not ship one with the product and you have to order it when ordering the laptop. However, the only option they had show on the website when I ordered mine was a Windows XP Restore Disk. So, I will have to investigate there a little bit soon.

The quality of the laptop overall is very good. I think there are still some issues with drivers and due to Windows 7 being very new I will give them a little bit to provide more drivers. The laptop is black and fortunately looks much better than a comparable Dell. The plastic is not as cheap as the Dell's and definitely not a fingerprint magnet like the Latitude 6500 series. The screen quality of the Lenovo laptop is excellent. The keyboard is solid and since I am typing a lot I can tell that it is of good quality. I still have to get accustomed to the location of some of the keys, but that is just a matter of time.

The battery life is about 3.5 hours for the Lenovo T500 laptop. I am having some problems with the laptop while in sleep mode. There battery is slowly going down - I assume due to some LED lights on the outside. It's probably something simple, but since I have the laptop only for a few days I have not fully investigated the issue yet.

My conclusion: I like the Lenovo T500 laptop and since I was able to compare it to a Dell Latitude 6500 in person I am glad I bought the Lenovo laptop. It looks more professional and gives me a greater bang for the dollar. There are some minor issues and I blame the driver support for Windows 7. I had the same problems with my Dell D820 when Windows Vista came out and the issues were resolved quickly with new drivers. I am expecting the same here. Dell will have to improve their laptops significantly to make me reconsider my choice.

Lenovo T500 With Windows 7 Reviewed