Lenovo ThinkPad T450s 14-Inch Laptop (Black)

After burning through 4 DELL Latitudes in a 3-month period, I decided to give Lenovo another chance. This model got the highest rating on Notebookcheck, my favorite laptop review site. This model is as close to perfect as anything I've worked with in my tech company. My only beef is the stupid Lenovo keyboard design - the left Ctl key is stuck between the Windows key and a "Fn" key that's used to activate the function keys on the top row. I use the left Ctl in all my Windows shortcuts - e.g. Ctl-C for copy - and all my standard keyboards have Ctl as the left-most key. Fortunately, Lenovo makes it easy to swap the function of the Fn and Ctl keys in the BIOS, so now all I have to do is ignore the labels on the laptop keyboard and press "Fn" when I want "Ctl" (hey, Lenovo, make the physical keys the same size so we can swap them, too!) Otherwise, it's all good. The machine runs fast yet quiet with its SSD drive and efficient heat management. The battery has at least twice the life as the DELL Latitude I had bought in March. Now, I'm eagerly awaiting the arrival of the T460 series with the Skylake chipset - hopefully, in August 2015.

Best computer you can buy. It is intended for "those how do". It has a lot of design details that really make the difference between this and other ultrabooks (e.g. downgrade to win7 because has no touchscreen, water spill keyboard protection, VGA and RJ45 ports, etc, etc). All this mixed with a powerfull i7 core with 8 gb RAM and 256gb ssd. Disk might come short in the future, yet if the SSD technology gets cheaper an upgrade can be made. It's fully capable with linux (I'm using Kubuntu 15 distro) with an outstanding more than 10 hours battery life (of course, it depends on the use).

Pros i7 upgradeable to 12gb ram Light Great battery Great documentation both hardware and software Cons Plasticy feel Easy to snap battery latch Trackpad can be flakey (check the windows options) UPDATE: As I was worried about, my plastic case broke near the hinges. However, the process for getting it fixed was so great (2 days mailed from my house) when compared to companies named after fruit I think it deserves even more praise!

Meh. Works just fine... Probably worth about $500.

Has a lot of problems out of the box; many of which have been reported by a lot of people but not fixed by the company. The computer goes to sleep and never wakes up, requiring a hard reboot. The fingerprint scanner also causes numerous errors on every startup. You have to manually uninstall it. Also, the computer comes with a ton of "Lenovo" software pre-installed; none of which you will want or need, but all of which will constantly nag you with pop-ups. I spent the first week cleaning off these programs, and now it's finally a decent machine. I wouldn't recommend this.

I bought this computer from Lenovo's website a couple years ago. It came with Windows 8 (which as we all know sucks) with an upgrade to Windows 10 (which also sucks). Being new to Win10, I was slow to notice certain issues, or maybe they were less frequent, I can't really say now, however, issues there are. Some of them: It sometimes won't wake from sleep mode, and then you're having to play games with the power button, and the only thing happening is the keyboard is slowly flashing the backlight until the screen finally pops up. Every time you open a browser, it doesn't fill the whole screen, so you're having to double-click on the tab bar to enlarge it. The computer won't tell you that you need to restart to finish Windows updates, it just starts doing weird stuff like not responding to certain keystrokes, closing screens, won't let you scroll down the page with a mouse, that sort of thing. Although there's an option buried in settings to auto-restart during down times, but it never retrains my choice, so I'm always having to restart manually. There are some other annoying issues, just can't recall them all now. Also, fair to point out, I can't really say if all of these are Win10 issues, or Win10 issues due to the upgrade from Win8, or if they're just Lenovo issues. But in any case, it's annoying having to persistently deal with them all. This is my second Lenovo laptop. My first one is T520 (still using it for work), never had problems with it of any sort. The T450S is notably lighter, has the SSD which is nice, on paper sounds real good, but I regret buying it, too many bugs.

This is a great laptop. Previously I ordered Thinkpad X1 3rn gen, but I didn't like it, returned. This one is perfect. Very comfortable keyboard. Complete ports. 12+ hours battery life. Fact i7 core. I think I will use it for a long time.

Laptop has been great. No issues whatsoever and runs very nicely! Went to a docking station a majority of the time as the screen is on the smaller side so can be heard to read after a while, but still a quality machine.