I hear on podcasts like from Ask Noah that Lenovo laptops are killer. He really means that a specific model or two are killer. All the rest of them are pretty much junk. I don’t recommend anyone purchase then.
Over the years of supporting and fixing computers I have had a lot of experience with Lenovo laptops. Years and years ago they were pretty good products. These past few years have shown me that these are not good products, primarily due to poor craftmanship. It’s as if they are trying to produce the worst product they can to get the most money out of the customer.
The primary thing that I find at issue are in securing the hinges to the bottom or top bezel. Invariably the screws that hold these hinges in place come free and cause a lot of issues due to cracking and breaking off of the parts that secure the hinges to the case. What happens is that they come a little loose and then because of the extra play and the frequent opening and closing of the lid of the laptop these break off.
Lenovo isn’t the only company to have these issues. Much older Dells did too. Some HP models. Virtually every manufacturer had models that did that. However, you can count on Lenovo to this day to still have the problem.
Another is the odd power connectors where you plug in the external power brick to the laptop itself.
Sometimes with some models you can’t get into the BIOS without pushing a button on the side. The hotkeys to get into the BIOS (when no button on the side is available) are not really documented well.
And their components that they choose seem to be some of the worst, such as the touchpad. Even from model to model the actual device can vary. What I mean is that you can buy one model and be amazed to know that that model had one of maybe 3 or more manufactures touchpads.
With certain models such as the Ideapad 5 when you visit their site there are no drivers for the touchpad. You might not even see the drivers listed in the device manager of the system. Under Linux they’ll work but under a new install of Windows they do not. The answer is that you have to download some obscure chipset component called the serial IO device software. Then the touchpad will show up in Windows system setting in the off position. You’ll then have to turn it on. No where on the Lenovo web site does it indicate this. Even in the description of the Serial IO software download does it say that this is used for the touchpad.
This is the link to the software that I used:
https://download.lenovo.com/consumer/mobiles/xrlw010f0are.exe
The next problem is just poor craftsmanship overall. The cheap wobbly display, the fragile nature of the plastic overall, the poorly done software configuration, the fact that they don’t provide proper drivers on their web site. For instance, I had to wipe a factory model sold to one of my customers and the store left it bitlockered, didn’t remove the admin account password, set the user up as a local standard account. This meant she couldn’t do updates, nor even open a command window, nor unbitlocker it. The only choice was to wipe and reinstall. After rebooting it became obvious that Windows didn’t support the components in the unit and that meant that I had to locate them. On the website they listed the driver for the device as a realtek, downloading and installing the wifi network that they said was realtek was not happening because it wasn’t realtek, instead it was an Intel wifi 6. Well Lenovo didn’t have those drivers so I had to seek them out on the intel site.
Lenovo has always been a sad product and I tell my customer’s to never buy them. Don’t buy Lenovo unless you want to have a nightmare like you’ve never seen before.