Shiny new toy

    It's a Lenovo Y560. It's pretty standard in the hardware department: 15" display, mainstream CPU (Core I5-430M), 4 GB RAM, 320GB hard-disk (as opposed to SSDs), with the notable exception of a Mobility Radeon 5730 GPU, combined with the integrated intel GPU. Well, with the initial excitement having faded, I guess I can have clear picture of what I got. It was the cheapest option available, so I expected some issues to balance that out. But I am not planning on using this more than the desktop I have at home; this is just for those short periods away from home.

Shiny new toy

    The option to use both a stand-alone and an integrated GPU, switching between them based on your needs sure sound nice on paper. But in practice, I don't use the feature very often. And I'm not sure about this, but I suspect this hybrid solution to be the cause for which I'm stuck with a VGA and a HDMI output only; no DVI. And, again... I'm not sure whether that is the cause, but when using the stand-along GPU, I see some disturbance in the image in the upper side of the screen. In some shades of gray, the pixels aren't stable on a specific color. It reminds me of the days of bad TV signal. But this can be ignored most of the time. You won't notice it while gaming or watching a clip. It seems I'm not the only one noticing this.

    The noise level is decent while idle. The laptop weighs only 2.7 Kgs, so, as you would expect, moving to a high load results in a considerable amount of noise. So far, everything as expected.

    The Multi-touch Touchpad was something which I hoped would be a bit more interesting. I was expecting a magic iPod pinch functionality available at my fingertips. It's the same if you open a picture in a browser; except that you can't rotate it. Other than that, not even close. I guess application support for this kind of devices is basically 0 at this point.


    The Keyboard feels nice to the touch. But it uses one of the new crappy layouts that places the Fn key in the corner, and the Ctrl to its right. I saw it on Asus notebooks previously and stayed away from them. Somehow, I forgot to check this when looking at the notebook initially.
Now, although there is a slim chance (through complicated mathematics I came up with 3.91%) that some people would actually find that placement better, I consider it just a method of screwing with the majority of users. These would be: all the users that used a PC before, all users that used a notebook before, all users that actually use shortcuts (instead of right clicking, selecting "edit" and then "copy", from a popup menu ... you know... like 5yr olds), but most of all, people (like me) who are smug enough to use more than one machine. If I happen to do that, it's obvious that I'm willing to learn to deal with multiple keyboard layouts, so I should rewire my brain to handle shortcuts I now do without any effort.
I was hoping that, like some models of the ThinkPad, Lenovo would enable the change from a BIOS setting.

Fn in the corner... why?

    Crap-ware: plenty of it. Most annoying was the Lenovo Veriface. I had to get rid of it the hard way, going into the registry and removing references to the process and file names. Gotta love crap-ware.

    Bottom line: It can handle what's important: Starcraft 2. I believe I received what I paid for in all aspects, except for the keyboard. I got screwed sideways on that.