I have a Lenovo.

Good machine, my only annoyance was for a business class device they disable VX extensions and no way to turn it on in the bios.
We had a HP that did that. It was out of warrantee, so after reading about a batch with too much Heat sink paste being made I took it apart to see what was wrong. Turned out to be a wedge of dust behind the fins of the of heat sink. You couldn't see it from outside and no amount of vacuuming would have shifted it.

So get a can of compressed air (air duster) and give the exhaust grills a good blast, if there is dust you'll see it being blown out of the air intake (the bit where you can see the fan)

Well i don't want to order from the US since the customs here tend to overcharge electronical devices here. He's also kind of old-fashioned and he doesn't wanna get things complicated and end up sending broken products overseas (if the warranty is still working).

pretty good discount though! People in US are very lucky regarding the prices.
didn't think that the GPU would be so bad, but it seems to be even worse than my old GT 430... WTF?
RAM is low but the guy that wants it now has 1GB of RAM and the HDD being sluggy doesn't matter much since his HDD now is at 5400RPMs too.

One thing i've gotta ask though cause i'm a big noob when it comes to laptops.
Do they have 2 slots for RAM? Cause i'd love to crank one more 4GB dimm in there. They only cost 18 euro!

It's a Chinese store, not a US one. I understand about wanting local warranty.

I hear that once Lenovo got sold to the Chinese the quality of the laptops took a nosedive.

I really like mine, but it's a 530W (ie, premium business brand). 3-4 years so far and so far, so good.

It's extremely durable. Once fell ~1.5m meter from a truck and landed on asphalt (no, I did not do it on purpose to test the laptop, I don't throw cash out the window) and as far as I can tell 2.5 years later, that incident hasn't had an impact on the laptop's functionality. I've also hauled it around a lot over the years. It's not a stationary house laptop. And it never overheated either. It has earned its stripes as a durable machine.

It also runs Ubuntu without a problem (including the Nvidia graphics card) though that's partly because many Linux distros are awesome at running on any hardware (but the graphics cards do tends to be the blocking point and in this case, it really wasn't).

Mind you, you do pay extra dollar for this. The graphics card is not top of the line for gaming (it's a business stability type) and you do get more specs for your buck if you go for a non-premium Lenovo laptop. However, I can't ascertain as to the durability of the non-premium Lenovo laptops (they don't comply to MIL specs which business Lenovo laptops do).

Also, an annoyance I got was that the recovery partition only allows for one backup of the factory Windows 7 OS. I screwed mine up so I had to call them to get backup DVDs (mind you, they were kind enough not to charge me for them).

I think they are good low budget product.
sure dell is better, but there is no dell that you can get for a really low price.
and if you compare a low budget hp laptop and a low budget lenovo laptop you will understand that lenovo is a better product.

Still if you want an high budget laptop lenovo is not a good product.

PS. With a 500€ budget I would try to get a laptop with a good integrated last gen intel and with a SSD drive.
A bad discrete graphic is worst than a good integrated one (and it use more battery).

but you CAN disable the GPU from the BIOS and have the onboard graphics working only, right?

The discrete graphics will simply not be used unless something which requires 3D is done. When not used it should take very little power. That said, no point paying for a discrete card if there's no need for it (but if it's not more expensive, it shouldn't hurt).

first of all, the quality products from Lenovo (formerly IBM) are the T series, the W series, and the X series ThinkPads.
you can ignore the rest.

these are business notebooks, so not made for gaming. I have an X230, you can basically play anything from before 2010 on there, not really suited for anything newer.

and price, well they are expensive. really expensive. X260 with good configuration starts at 1800 euros in europe.
this is definitely not budget hardware.

/EDIT: you can do a bit more gaming with the W series with integrated discrete graphics, these notebooks are not very portable though, quite heavy and use a lot of power.

Why do they hate them?

I generally like the old IBM ThinkPads and Lenovo ThinkPads, but then I have experience only with their business line of laptops, not the consumer ones. However, T400 did have something I consider a design flaw, its two USB ports on one side break up very easily because they are too close together (put two fat memory sticks in those ports, and the memory sticks will not go in straight, possibly breaking that plastic aligner inside the USB port).

So in my T400 there was only one working USB port left, the single one on the other side. Those other two ports were broken. I also saw some store which sells second-hand business laptops to consumers for cheap prices, they mentioned for their T400 that two of its USB ports are broken, so it seems I was not alone with that problem.


But even with that, the HP laptop I got later from work was generally worse than the Lenovos. It didn't even have any keyboard light (so I couldn't see the keyboard on dim lightning), and also taking it out or putting in into the docking station was far worse than with Lenovos. With Lenovos I could pretty much just take it out of the docking station and put back and everything was fine, while the HP couldn't cope with that. Nope, it had various issues if you did anything like that, in practise I always have to shut it down and then restart in such situations. That's why I often don't even put it into the docking station at all, if I know there will be meetings I need to go to.

Do note that last year Lenovo were in the news with regards to pre-installing advertising spyware on their machines. I personally wouldn't trust them.

usually if they put a discrete graphic they use a previous generation cpu, or a bad cpu (celeron).
at least in my country shops (even on amazon)

They did for a while, but then they got their sh*t together and their Thinkpad line is, IMHO, the only business laptops worth considering.
They're definitely not gaming beasts, but rugged and dependable.
The Thinkpad Yoga I got my wife is awesome quality.

Lenovo's non-Thinkpads are pretty *meh*.

But at least they're not HP level shite. Yuck!

Every single laptop brand out there these days sell a wide range of products from terrible to awesome. Lenovo is exactly like that - if you buy a premium priced product it will be a lot better than their cheaper releases.
I'd recommend the following sites for in-depth reviews:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/
http://laptopmedia.com/

For the E 500 price range you should expect a fairly bad display possibly with PWM (flickering), poor colour fidelity and brightness these days, possibly a TN panel.

For watching movies and good reading experience go for a laptop with IPS display, decent brightness, no PWM (or PWM only on low brightness settings).
If you only want these two activities exactly these categories are where tablet screens are markedly better.
If you want to use PC software, then be very careful and check the reviews on the display of the laptop. Make sure that you are happy with the results before buying, and check in person as well.

Laptop screens are supplied by different vendors and manufacturers simply choose the cheapest high volume vendor at any specific time, so you can get very different screen with different batches of the same laptop.
Lenovo and HP screens tend to be really nasty and cheap in their budget lines. Dell is famous for panel (display) lottery for the same reason, apart from the lines where having a decent display is part of the specifications, e.g. XPS and Precision 55xx.

My parents now have their second. If it's just for e-mail, browsing and some casual games, it will do perfectly.
Though I would recommend getting rid of all the Lenovo software.