Comment Re:Lenovo ThinkPhones, anyone . . . ? (Score 1) 181
No, but their laptops do my head in -- their ThinkPad branded ones at least. The hardware is actually very nice, apart from one key component, the track-pad.
A couple of years ago they went from a usable regular track-pad with two physical mouse buttons, to a mutant Macbook ripoff that has the buttons a part of the touch sensitive surface. This makes using two fingers -- one to swipe the other to click -- an exercise in frustration as your clicking finger also registers as movement and the cursor jumps about.
I also had a lot of trouble right clicking, i don't remember why but i had pretty much given up at that point and plugged in a USB mouse. I guess this could be fixed with some decent touchpad software/drivers, but out of the box is is a nightmare.
Also they load epic amounts of Lenovo (and other) branded crapware. I'm pretty sure as you go up their price range this increases, as it adds an extra feature bullet point on the spec sheet. 90% gets immediately uninstalled if i am anywhere near it. They also don't ship any recovery discs (i guess this it not too unusual now) and force you to burn your own if you want something else other than the recovery partition. Due to the amount of extra software this took 40 mins and 3 DVDs!
Finally there is no means to create a vanilla Windows restore disc, so you have waste more time adding the correct SLIC cert files to a custom DVD image to get it to activate a vanilla Windows install, if you want to purge all trace of pre-installed software.
The only good thing is i learnt this without me or my family having bought one, they were all company purchases.
A couple of years ago they went from a usable regular track-pad with two physical mouse buttons, to a mutant Macbook ripoff that has the buttons a part of the touch sensitive surface. This makes using two fingers -- one to swipe the other to click -- an exercise in frustration as your clicking finger also registers as movement and the cursor jumps about.
I also had a lot of trouble right clicking, i don't remember why but i had pretty much given up at that point and plugged in a USB mouse. I guess this could be fixed with some decent touchpad software/drivers, but out of the box is is a nightmare.
Also they load epic amounts of Lenovo (and other) branded crapware. I'm pretty sure as you go up their price range this increases, as it adds an extra feature bullet point on the spec sheet. 90% gets immediately uninstalled if i am anywhere near it. They also don't ship any recovery discs (i guess this it not too unusual now) and force you to burn your own if you want something else other than the recovery partition. Due to the amount of extra software this took 40 mins and 3 DVDs!
Finally there is no means to create a vanilla Windows restore disc, so you have waste more time adding the correct SLIC cert files to a custom DVD image to get it to activate a vanilla Windows install, if you want to purge all trace of pre-installed software.
The only good thing is i learnt this without me or my family having bought one, they were all company purchases.