Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Edit: This was originally a five-star review. I'm still really happy with my purchase, but I ran into stuttering on YouTube videos and unimpressive/inconsistent download times that I couldn't seem to fix. Come to find out the wifi cards that come preinstalled on these laptops leave something to be desired. This isn't a big deal if you have an ethernet cable handy, but it would likely be a massive pain for anyone meaning to, say, write an essay at a coffee shop. I swapped out the wifi card in my old laptop for the one in this one and it works flawlessly. I can't vouch for it, but I've read Intel's AX200NGW wifi card is a good replacement for the one that comes stock in these machines. If you're going to be adding RAM or an extra HDD anyway, swapping out the wifi card isn't too difficult; the tiny connectors are just really finicky. I could live with the wifi as it was, but I don't have access to a wired connection as much as I'd like. If that's you, be prepared for a bit of tinkering. Everything else I said stands. Edit 2: Elden Ring runs great on this. ---- I paid a little under $750 for this laptop. Out the gate, I added 32GB of RAM, which cost me around $150. That's overkill - 16GB is perfectly serviceable on this configuration, especially without a secondary SSD, and 16GB would cost roughly half that. I wanted to future proof my purchase and make it simple to switch out my secondary mechanical drive in the future. I would absolutely recommend swapping the RAM for two 16GB sticks (you want them to be the same variety to get the most performance and bang for your buck) and the 8GB my model came with is only just enough for Windows at this point. If you only intend to run Steam and some games, it might do. If you have a Chromium-based web browser running in the background, forget about it. Trust me - extra RAM will save you a lot of headache. My model didn't come with easy access panels on the back for adding an HDD or for changing out the RAM. Luckily the screws are fairly easy to remove, and the panel came off pretty easily with a plastic pry tool. (Amazon sells the kit I use - it's really handy to have on hand in case you ever need to get inside your machine. Search "Syntus Electronic Repair Tool Kit with Magnetic Driver Kit, 80 in 1 Professional Precision Screwdriver Set with Portable Pouch for iPhone, iPad, MacBook, Gaming Console, Controller, Black") There's two M.2 slots and one SATA slot. I wouldn't recommend mounting a second M.2 drive - one, I'm not sure how you'd safely mount it in this revision. Two, if you watch Linus Tech Tips video on the performance difference between a SATA SSD and M.2 drives, you'll see that the average user isn't going to notice a difference between the two types of SSDs. Frankly, my 7200rpm mechanical drive loads things really quickly on this laptop, so I'm not even in a rush to upgrade from that. Games like The Witcher 3 run perfectly fine off of it. (And honestly, if you're on a budget and don't want to deck out this laptop with the best kit it can handle, 2TB 7200rpm mechanical drives can be had for around $40-$80 these days.) The build quality is fantastic. You can tell which parts of it are a little cheaper than others - I'd be careful with the plastic tabs when you're prying the bottom off; take your time with it - but it feels solid the moment you take it out the box. The back of the IPS panel is mounted to metal. The bezels are designed such that it's entirely feasible for you, as the user, to open up and work on your own hardware. From a right-to-repair standpoint, this machine is as good as it gets in this price range. Even if you have no interest in working on it or ever opening it up, you can take it to a local computer shop and be rest assured they can easily get to whatever they need to work on. The screen is the part most likely to fail on a laptop over extended use. I haven't cracked open the bezel on my unit because my screen was in perfect working order and after a nightmare I had with a different laptop, I just wanted to get back to using my computer. Looking up tutorials and images online, every model of this computer I've seen uses screws to hold the screen in place. No glue or anything like that. In the event that you or a technician ever needs to swap out the screen for a different one, it should be a fairly simple process. And again I return to build quality - I've noticed very little light bleed when I'm running various applications. This is not the best ips panel I have ever used, but let me stress again - for the price? It's amazing. High refresh rate. Everything is crystal clear. Good contrast. It's been a joy to do photo editing work on it. For gaming - I use Linux as my daily driver, and removed Windows from this device as soon as I got it set up and made sure there weren't any malfunctions or defects that would warrant calling the manufacturer or returning it to Amazon. If you're curious whether this makes a good Linux machine - yes, with some caveats. My model - 15ACH6 - did not have working wifi out of the box in Pop OS or Manjaro. I initially wanted to use Pop OS because it has great hybrid graphics support (better than Windows, if you ask me) and it comes pre-packed with tools to help maximize your laptop's battery life. However, making the wifi work wasn't a simple fix. There are several methods; the least complicated one for me was upgrading the kernel. Problem is - Pop OS is an Ubuntu-based OS and isn't designed to have the kernel upgraded independent of the operating system. Long story short - I got Pop OS working perfectly, but getting the kernel upgraded was just the first issue I had to solve. I also had to change the power management settings so my wifi wasn't throttled, and my printer was detected but wasn't working properly out of the box. Manjaro makes it easy to upgrade the kernel, and I was up and running within an hour. The thing that took the longest was waiting for all the updates to install. The only thing I had to do to make full use of my hardware was update the Nvidia drivers, manually install the Optimus Switcher (look up "How to setup Optimus Manager on Manjaro! | DenshiHelp" on YouTube, especially if you use KDE) and adjust the power management settings. If you're a Linux user or you're Linux-curious, Manjaro is your best bet on this thing if you want a relatively painless experience. (This is also why I bought so much RAM - if I absolutely have to use Windows for any reason, I want the extra memory to run a VM.) Mind, this shouldn't be an issue in the future. The latest version of Pop OS at the time of this writing is 21.10. If you get this same model of this laptop and newer revisions of the major Linux operating systems have been released, it should be a fairly seamless experience regardless of which one you choose. I also want to note - in terms of getting this laptop to boot from USB, this was by far the most painless experience I've had. Any other laptop I've had has fought me tooth and nail when I wanted to remove Windows and install Linux. Part of that's the AMD architecture - in my experience, AMD respects their users more than Intel or Nvidia does, so if that's important to you, this is a great machine. If you've ever heard of Intel's Management Engine, AMD's equivalent - the PSP - can be just be switched off in the BIOS. Not once has this machine tried to tell me - its owner and end user - what I can and cannot do with it. But back to gaming - I didn't try to run anything on Windows, but I can tell you just from the hardware specs you're going to have a great experience with anything released from 2018-2020, and the GTX 1650 would be a respectable graphics card even in a desktop at this point thanks to the current market. You most likely won't be running a game released in 2022 on Ultra on this laptop, but you should be able to get admirable performance on medium-to-high settings running something that just released. On Linux running Proton - The Witcher 3 runs flawlessly for me on the highest settings using the current experimental version of Proton through Steam. Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy, runs flawlessly. All the indie and retro-style platformers I threw at it - Cuphead, Bloodstained Curse of the Moon, Blaster Master Zero - flawless. Streets of Rage 4, Mother Russia Bleeds, Terraria, Celeste, Knights of the Old Republic 2 - those are Linux native so they ran for me as well as they do in Windows. Most of your older RPGs like Fallout: New Vegas and Morrowind will run amazingly on here regardless of what OS you're using. I won't sugarcoat it and tell you that gaming on Linux is every bit as good as gaming on Windows. It's not. If you want to play the latest multiplayer games with your friends or you like to hop around and try different games when they come out without having to check if they work and without having to tinker, keep Windows on this machine. For me - I have always been about 5 years behind the curve, my favorite games are in 2D, and I refuse to play games with excessive DRM (here's looking at you, Denuvo) or invasive anti-cheat (that is a security timebomb waiting to go off) so my experience switching from Windows to Linux has been relatively painless as a gamer. Valve's Proton is at a great place right now, and if you look up anything that's Steam Deck verified you should have a good time. You've got hundreds - if not thousands - of games at your disposal regardless of what kind of OS you're running. To end this off - I am in love with this laptop, and I would gladly get another Lenovo machine in the future. The 8 gigs of RAM it came with is a little lean, but it's an easy upgrade, and you will definitely want to add a harddrive anyway. The IO is a little lacking at a mere two USB 3.0 ports, but - they're both USB 3, and you can attach a USB hub. (Just don't run an external HDD off it as most USB hubs don't draw additional power from the slot.) The build quality is rock solid. The specs are respectable enough that it will breathe new life into your older games and allow you to play most newer titles. You can easily do photo and video editing on this. It's set up to be easy to clean, maintenance, and repair. All in all, for less than $800? This thing is a steal.