Customer Reviews

Lenovo Thinkpad SL 410 14-Inch Black Laptop - Up to 4.1 Hours of Battery Life (Windows XP Pro)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I purchased the Lenovo SL410 after my trusty, 5 year old Dell finally died and I must say, I am extremely impressed.

For the price ($625), I have yet to see any others come close. In fact, this definitily seems like a much more expensive machine than it is. The design, although boring and old looking at first, has really grown on me and I have come to appreciate the simple beauty of it. No fancy case or buttons, just simple and easy to use features that always work instantly one pressed or used.

The trackpad is great and it even has the scroll feature on the right side, which is extremely useful when browsing the web. The keyboard is also of great size and response and is even spill proof! Really, it has drains which will drain any spilled liquid on the keyboard. I love this feature, since I replaced the keyboard on my old Dell TWICE for this reason.

Windows 7 has been great. I never owned a Vista, but did work on a few and it was awful. The Windows 7 that is installed in the SL410 has been wonderful. It is basically Vista with all the bugs worked out!

The number 1 thing about this laptop is the SCREEN! Not sure if its standard, bu the one i have has the glossy HD screen and it is unreal. HD video on this is bar none! Similar to the the screens on a Mac. Great!

A close 2nd favorite thing on this is the build-in Wi-Fi. WOW! My signal strenth is always powerful no matter where in my house. My sister has a Dell Mini Netbook, which she paid $550 for less than a year ago, and she cant get any wifi from her room. With the Lenovo, I have full signal strenth from my room which is much furhter from the wifi point in our house! Unreal.

I purchased this as a work travel/home laptop so I didnt need all the fancy media packages that HP and those other brands offer, but this thing has rocked for media. I am an avid photographer and this thing has no problem working with my DSLR, Flip Videos and other gadgets i have. I also use with my iPhone and iPod and have yet to experience issues or delay.

I did my research before purchasing and nothing in this same price point can compare.

I strongly reccomend this to anyone looking for a fast, reliable and efficient machine for work or play.

My HP died, found out that the HP DV2000 which I had was defective, problems with the motherboard would show up after 2-3 years of use. HP was aware of the problem and would fix it for me for $400 + shipping (my warrenty was up). Decided it was better to get a new laptop. Never again an HP! The Geek at Best Buy told me this was the laptop he bought, made by IBM and very dependable. He did not steer me wrong as far as I could tell. It takes a little getting used to Windows 7, I had Vista previously and XP on a desktop. But everything with this machine was easy, set up to internet, program installation etc. And it is fast!! Yes it is slow to start but that is Windows 7, Vista was slow also. Have the same stuff on this computer as my old HP and I still have tons of space on the hard drive. So far I am very happy. The think pad tools icon also is a help. I trust computer geeks when it comes to this sort of thing, he did not try to get me to buy a $1200.00 machine, this was half the price and it feels great.

I have only used the SL-410 for about two weeks, so my experience is, admittedly, limited with this product.

Overall I would rate this a 4-star laptop, excellent for moderate business productivity. The screen is sharp, glossy, but so much that it catches glare coming from florescent lights, or through office windows. The keyboard buttons are large and I find typing fairly simple and easy. The mouse interface has both the "nub" (my own word) which is a characteristic red finger sensor that used to be common on most of the major brands but only remains on Lenovo laptops, and the trackpad, which does hiccup sometimes, so your cursor can jump around unintentionally if you don't use small gestures. I have no problem with either of these really.

Initially, when you boot up the computer you will encounter the telltale bloatware present on every new PC these days. My first boot up took nearly twenty minutes (18m:45s) and until I disabled all of the completely unnecessary programs running the performance was quite pathetically slow for a Core 2 Duo processor. However, I used the MSCONFIG utility (type MSCONFIG in the search bar of the start menu) to disable all of the bloatware on startup and when I rebooted the computer was a far more reasonable 3 minutes.

It was when I went to backup the system disks on the Lenovo partition that I ran into my first problem. I ordered the Dual Layer DVD rom specifically for a project that requires a lot of data backup, so when the system hanged after I put in the DVD-DL, I was distressed to discover that my laptop was configured with the CD-RW combo drive, despite the invoice and order information containing the part # of a DL drive. Lenovo's post-sales number (1.866.428.4465) gave me someone with imperfect English who told me to call technical support. I called the number from the invoice--and to make a long story short, I have been bounced back to post-sales and I am waiting to find out if I need to ship the whole computer back or if they can just send my a new drive. Since I don't think that Lenovo's DVD drives are modular the way that Dell and HP drives are, I think I must ship it all back. As it turns out, this is a good thing, as I have since discovered that my RAM isn't the 1066mhz DDR2 that I ordered, but 800mhz DDR2, which isn't really that much of a performance decrease, but still, I should have received what I paid for.

Anyway, I reduced my rating by 2 stars to account for each of these misconfigured items, and if my Lenovo return process goes well I will post a comment amending my review rating.

Pros:

Intel processor, screen size, Thinkpad line, okay cooling, adequate graphics

Cons: First of all, my unit came with Windows 7 X64 pro on it, not exactly the same as this one

-"Ctrl" key is NOT the left most one on the bottom row, for someone who uses keyboard shortcuts, it's a nightmare to always remind myself "it's the second to the last key".

-worst motherboard ever, as you will have issues installing another windows 7 version or upgrading later on, because the storage drivers are not compatible and leads to BSOD or failure during system install. At first I thought it was the CD/USB drive that I loaded Windows 7 x64 Ultimate onto, but installed Win 7 on two other PC's (laptop and desktop) without a hitch with the same disc/USB. In all fairness Microsoft also to blame partly for this problem. Common M$, keep the communications open with 3rd party distributors and ensure your valued customers does not have to spend days to figure out a simple 15 min system upgrade/install.

-Cheap feel, mind you this is not a business class laptop albeit the "Thinkpad" line name, it does not have a metal skeleton inside the case such as the high-end Thinkpads or Alienware; you get what you paid for in this case.

-Owned the unit ~1 year, used it infrequently since I have another HP from work, finally got Windows 7 installed by pulling out the hard drive and installed Win 7 onto it in my work laptop (yeah it installed fine), then placed the hard drive back into this unit. Junked it at a local PC shop for $250 in return. The unit runs Win 7 ok after all that nonsense, but still with errors.

Other thoughts:

Laptops are not like desktops, which you can easily swap out a motherboard if problems occur; such case is when my desktop's mobo died I just swapped out a new one with $50 and an hour of my time. For a laptop, you either spend $300+ for labor/parts or you spend a day trying to replace it. Hate to say it, since Lenovo took over the Thinkpad Line, those junky Asian parts just pollute this line of premium mobile computing. My suggestion for Lenovo is to change the name of these laptops to "Unthink Pads", it certainly stifles encouragement of any further dealings with Lenovo on my end. Changing to Toshiba Protege/Alienware.

Alpha

I purchased a Lenovo Thinkpad SL410 that came
with Windows 7 Professional (64 bit) installed on it.
It was easy to upgrade the RAM (Memory) from 2GB to 8GB for $50.
The connection Ports, Support, Features and speed of this laptop
was impressive. Highly recommend this laptop.

After purchasing this laptop, I learned that was it just a glorified consumer version and did not have the same quality as the commercial versions of the thinkpad series. As a result, one of the speakers is not working and the battery is only charging to half of its capacity after about one year. Unfortunately, it is out of warranty. Far be it, it did last the one year warranty, but everyone expects it to last longer. So if you need a laptop to be fully functional for only one year, then feel to purchase this item.

The SL 410 is an OK laptop but for some strange reason it is advertised as a Win XP Pro when it has a Win7 64 bit OS. Also, it has the old Centrino chip; which, if I'd known, I probably wouldn't purchase. However, I can't complain too much because the price made it a reasonably good gamble.

I was big IBM laptops fan since X31. But SL410 is last drop. I can't stand it any more.
My sound card messed up in less than 6 moth. I had to restore whole laptop to its factory defaults twice in less than a year. To be exact 9 month.
Despite having good spec, performance is just more than disappointing.
Sorry my French, but I'll never buy Lenovo crap any more.

This laptop is a disaster, don't buy anything from Lenovo. This is my 2nd lenovo and I have had to send it back to the factory 3 in a span of 6 months to get something or the other fixed. Their repair is painfully slow and support is horrible. The laptop's screen starts developing bands and you need to send your laptop back to the factory for replacement each time. The laptop's body is equally fragile and starts developing cracks in a matter of months. Their support is a joke; No one answers your call for 30 minutes and when they do they just put you on hold and pass you around from department to department.

Don't buy a lenovo laptop. Even my 300$ second hand laptop is better than this.

For the most part the machine has been great. A good amount of power and speed...until I really started using it regularly. I had 7 system crashes in 2 days because I had, maybe 4 windows open.
I've had to reload Windows 7 x64, 4...that's right...4 times since February (which is a Microsoft issue, not Lenovo).
In the last month it has been decreasing in speed and power. It now takes between 5-6 minutes to get any selections from the Control Panel to load. One of the USB ports fails to eject anything...ever.
For the money spent it really isn't a terrible deal (I could tolerate it being cheaper though)...I, however, will be getting something, wait, anything else as soon as I can. This does NOT have IBM durability and Customer Service leaves A LOT to be desired...perhaps agents not reading from scripts, that can answer questions, and don't interrupt while you're asking questions so they can spout all of the "customer satisfaction" messages that pop up on their screens.