Pretty Vacant

I’m the lucky owner for the past four years or so of a Lenovo Yoga 500. It looks fabulous. Just a shame about what’s under the lid.

First that it is hideously underpowered for running Windows 10, the o/s it comes with. Open up a fairly efficient browser – Chrome say – open up a facebook window and webmail or the like. Go make yourself a cup of coffee while you wait for those to load. Now click between the two windows and drink the coffee while you wait for it to catch up with a heavy task like flicking between two browser tabs.

The other problem, and this seems to be specific to the Yoga range, is that a fault in the charging hardware means that if you leave it plugged in overnight on sleep mode, there’s about a one in three chance it won’t wake up in the morning. When that happens you’re stuck – either leave it for a week for the charge to run down in the battery and you can give it a cold boot from fresh, or invalidate the warranty, unplug the (non-removable) battery, plug it back in and get out of the error state it’s in that way.

Lenovo tech support swear there is no such problem despite pages and pages on their forums of people running into the same manufacturing fault.

A shame. The T420 I had previous to this was a brilliant machine, sturdy and with a decent amount of welly — right up to the point that it died stone cold dead three days out of the 12 month warranty, never to boot again.

I really miss IBM making thinkpads…

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