Got the y560p. Overall I'm pretty happy with it. For the price I got a wickedly fast CPU, 750GB HD, and discreet graphics card. All things that I wanted. On top of that I got a keyboard without numpad and a centered touch pad, both of which I prefer.
Unfortunately there are a few problems, some with workarounds, others... I don't know. *sigh*
First thing I ran into is the touch pad is actually rather *big*. Small problem, just takes some getting used to, it's the reach between left and right click that I have to adjust to most. Far from a deal breaker in any case.
Then there is the fact that the normal lower-left Ctrl key is now the Fn key. Many, many laptop manufacturers make this "mistake" (mistake IMHO) and I really don't understand why. Ctrl has been in this position on most keyboards for eons. Fn is a new-ish key that is only present on laptops. There's no particularly good reason not to put the Fn key where they always move the Ctrl key to. This one does really bug me. Admittedly it's something you can adjust to, but since desktop keyboards are all the "normal" way it's harder. I will be looking into a key remapper, but I saw that some people on the Lenovo forums were going so far as to use a custom (and obviously unsupported) *BIOS modification* just to get this system-wide. Yeesh
OK, now we get into the more serious stuff. The next thing I noticed was the touch pad would stop responding for a half second or so after any typing. This one I didn't understand at all. I figured it had to be a settings issue with the touchpad and I scoured around in there, eventually discovering that turning down the "palm guard" (supposed to help avoid accidental touch pad motion when typing) helped a good amount. Now the delay is minimal, though it's still there a bit. I also turned off most of the touch pad "gestures" as I find then being triggered at random too often. So fortunately this whole issue was minimized.
Finally, the biggest issue that still somewhat remains, the dithering on this laptop is some of the worst I've ever seen. For those of you not familiar with dithering, it's a color reproduction method used by cheap LCDs (on most laptops; Apple was even sued over this!) that basically tries to make up for lower color depth (6 bit vs. 8 bit) by using multiple colors in patterns (like newsprint) to simulate more subtle gradients. It's generally not that noticeable on your average laptop screen, but for some reason here it's pretty distracting, at least for me. Apparently the y560 has had this problem off and on for a while, even back into 6+ months ago with the previous model (before Sandy Bridge). That being the case it's frankly rather shocking and dismaying that the problem persists now. I may just be unusually sensitive to it, but it definitely bothers me, and is worse than my previous Toshiba, or even the cheap, generic replacement LCD I eventually had to get for it (when I cracked the original
).
There's a lot of discussion in the Lenovo forums about the display issue and various possible fixes. It seems as though it *may* be something Lenovo can fix with a BIOS update or graphics card driver fix. That remains to be seen. Fortunately I did find that turning the refresh rate down from 60hz to 50hz seems to help a bit and makes the effect almost invisible in many cases. It's still there if I look close, but it's better. This seemed odd to me, but I'm not going to argue. Surprisingly I didn't see any mention of this on the Lenovo forums yet...
Last but not least, there is the new
Intel Sandy Bridge chipset issue which has just cropped up. It's unclear yet whether it affects laptops as I think they may use a different chipset, and certainly a different board design, but it's certainly still of concern. I will be waiting to see how it pans out.
Now this may seem like a lot of issues, but I've found issues with almost every product I've purchased. I will say I was more thoroughly pleased with my Eee when I bought it, and with the Toshiba 15" laptop that preceeded this Lenovo. But both also have some issues.
Ultimately I am not certain I am going to keep this thing, though I am leaning toward yes as the price is right and the basic hardware is solid. So far I've been able to work around or mitigate most of the issues I've encountered *except* the possible Intel chipset issue. Waiting to hear about that one...
Mostly I'm just frustrated at what seem like really obvious and, in many cases, preventable issues. These things should be caught in QA. If laptop makers stopped trying to reinvent the wheel with e.g. new keyboard layouts and whatnot, I think there would be a lot less of some of these issues. I just don't understand why they keep doing this as it usually causes more problems than it solves. I suppose they want to differentiate their products, but I say that sticking with what works would be different enough from the competition as it is! You should see HPs new nightmarish "all-in-one touchpad" on all their new laptops, widely regarded as absolutely awful to use. How do these things get out of the labs!?
Regardless of my satisfaction with this model, I think it's a clear case of wait-and-see for any 2nd gen i-series CPU laptops at this point given the Intel chipset issue. Wait and see if it affects laptops, if not then you're in the clear. We should know within a week or two.
- Oshyan
