Just a quick review of my thoughts so far on the laptop. My last laptop was the t420s Thinkpad, I'll do my best to compare it to that.
System
I got the i7-5500u with a second M.2 SSD card, the AC-7265 wifi card and 8Gigs of ram. I immediately formatted the drives and installed Ubuntu 14.04 and then upgraded to 14.10.
Screen
With a 1080p IPS I can't complain. It looks great and has a good viewing angle. Colours look good and I can differentiate the blues and blacks from the whites and golds easily. There is a tiny amount of light leaking around the edges, but I can only notice it if I really look while there is a pure black screen during boot.
I'm sure there are better screens out there, but this is more than good enough for me.
Keyboard
Obviously this is a massive step down from the t420s. You have to hit the keys more accurately, they are not as nice to press and the layout isn't as nice as the function keys and hardware keys are integrated on the top row: the power button is just above the backspace button, no gap between f4 and f5, volume control managed via the secondary function of the f-keys etc...
All these factors were clear before I bought the laptop, and all the other manufactures (including lenovo) have been reducing the quality of their keyboards, which I think is a real shame.
Overall I'm happy with it.
Trackpad
The central main area of the trackpad is clickable and towards the bottom it loosens into a left and right mouse buttons (there seemed to be some confusion about this on the forum). The edges aren't clickable but you can scroll vertically along them. You can also right click with a two fingered tap starting with just the right finger and ending with just the left finger. Over the whole trackpad you can lightly tap the surface of the trackpad cilck.
I'll be waiting patiently for driver support as it's not great, but it is usable. I will continue to use an external mouse anyway, as I prefer it to any trackpad.
Graphics
I'm getting small glitches in the window titles. No show stoppers. I'm sure these will be fixed soon if not already.
Suspend
It doesn't come back from suspend quite right. I'm not sure what exactly is wrong, but sometimes things take longer than I think they should. I'm certain this is a software issue. I've generally found this always to be the case when running new hardware on Ubuntu.
Fan
The fan pipes up every now and then and goes away fairly quickly. They don't seem to be running most of the time, even under moderate load they are completely silent. When they do pipe up, they come up to full speed and go back down quite abrutly.
Bonus
I managed to get Photoshop CC installed via wine. I'm not sure when this started working, or how stable it is right now. But considering playonlinux says it shouldn't work on Intel Graphics and it seems to be working, I'm pretty happy.
Internals
I'm going to keep running this for another few days then I will open it up to put my data hdd in. I'm also hoping that 8gb isn't the max amount of ram the system can handle as I'd like to upgrade in the future.
Overall
I'm happy with the laptop, especially at the price point it is at.
I'll answer any questions I can.
System
I got the i7-5500u with a second M.2 SSD card, the AC-7265 wifi card and 8Gigs of ram. I immediately formatted the drives and installed Ubuntu 14.04 and then upgraded to 14.10.
Screen
With a 1080p IPS I can't complain. It looks great and has a good viewing angle. Colours look good and I can differentiate the blues and blacks from the whites and golds easily. There is a tiny amount of light leaking around the edges, but I can only notice it if I really look while there is a pure black screen during boot.
I'm sure there are better screens out there, but this is more than good enough for me.
Keyboard
Obviously this is a massive step down from the t420s. You have to hit the keys more accurately, they are not as nice to press and the layout isn't as nice as the function keys and hardware keys are integrated on the top row: the power button is just above the backspace button, no gap between f4 and f5, volume control managed via the secondary function of the f-keys etc...
All these factors were clear before I bought the laptop, and all the other manufactures (including lenovo) have been reducing the quality of their keyboards, which I think is a real shame.
Overall I'm happy with it.
Trackpad
The central main area of the trackpad is clickable and towards the bottom it loosens into a left and right mouse buttons (there seemed to be some confusion about this on the forum). The edges aren't clickable but you can scroll vertically along them. You can also right click with a two fingered tap starting with just the right finger and ending with just the left finger. Over the whole trackpad you can lightly tap the surface of the trackpad cilck.
I'll be waiting patiently for driver support as it's not great, but it is usable. I will continue to use an external mouse anyway, as I prefer it to any trackpad.
Graphics
I'm getting small glitches in the window titles. No show stoppers. I'm sure these will be fixed soon if not already.
Suspend
It doesn't come back from suspend quite right. I'm not sure what exactly is wrong, but sometimes things take longer than I think they should. I'm certain this is a software issue. I've generally found this always to be the case when running new hardware on Ubuntu.
Fan
The fan pipes up every now and then and goes away fairly quickly. They don't seem to be running most of the time, even under moderate load they are completely silent. When they do pipe up, they come up to full speed and go back down quite abrutly.
Bonus
I managed to get Photoshop CC installed via wine. I'm not sure when this started working, or how stable it is right now. But considering playonlinux says it shouldn't work on Intel Graphics and it seems to be working, I'm pretty happy.
Internals
I'm going to keep running this for another few days then I will open it up to put my data hdd in. I'm also hoping that 8gb isn't the max amount of ram the system can handle as I'd like to upgrade in the future.
Overall
I'm happy with the laptop, especially at the price point it is at.
I'll answer any questions I can.
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