Nobody likes to spend money unnecessarily and I wasn’t looking forward to buying a new laptop when my old Dell failed. However, now that I have this new Lenovo Flex 2 15D I have to admit I have received value for money.
The new notebook has the same screen size and resolution as my old Dell so it’s pretty easy on the eyes. But it has a number of incrementally nice features:
- It’s thinner and lighter. The new netbook designs skew that way – even the basic ones like this. The new machine is only about 3 cm thick.
- It folds back to an easel configuration if you want to watch video or read an online magazine. It’s not quite as flexible as a Lenovo Yoga but pretty good.
- It has a great keyboard and touchpad with a numeric keypad – Lenovo learned a thing or two from IBM after they got the Thinkpad franchise.
- It has a touchscreen – not that I’ve used it much as I am a mouse and keyboard guy. But it’s a nice feature in such a lower priced unit.
- It runs Windows 8.1 – better than Windows 8. I’m not sure this is a feature I’d have wanted but honestly Windows 8 isn’t as bad as I thought originally. Once you install Classic Shell and banish the Start Screen and tablet apps for good, Windows 8 is just fine. It boots and runs faster than Windows 7.
- The hardware is pretty good for a cheap laptop. AMD has come a long way in its Hybrid System Architecture project and this A8 “Beema” processor works very well. It’s a System on Chip configuration – processor, graphics card and memory controller all on the same chip. This simplifies the motherboard design, reduces power consumption and heat generation. Battery life is far greater than with my old 2010 Phenom II laptop and the performance is better. The laptop also has a slim DVD-ROM and a fast mechanical hard drive with tons of storage space. It also has 8 GB of RAM which is plenty for what I want to do. I’m not running games or simulations on this unit. Got the big desktop for that.
- Bloatware wasn’t a major problem and most of it was actually tablet apps which I never see anyway. I uninstalled a lot of stuff like that so if I do have to look at the Start Screen it’s pretty clean.
So all in all I’m pretty happy with the Flex 2 netbook and pretty happy with Lenovo’s design. It never hurts to get value for money.