{"id":113,"date":"2010-01-05T23:45:51","date_gmt":"2010-01-06T07:45:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/?p=113"},"modified":"2010-01-23T12:56:34","modified_gmt":"2010-01-23T20:56:34","slug":"lenovo-g-550-first-impressions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/archives\/113","title":{"rendered":"Lenovo G-550 first impressions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After a lot of trepidation, I managed to convince myself that I could use&#8211;nay, <em>deserved<\/em>&#8211;a laptop. One which would be cheap and portable, while still being powerful and comfortable enough for a two-hour coding binge at a local Starbucks. I ended up settling on a <a href=\"http:\/\/shop.lenovo.com\/SEUILibrary\/controller\/e\/web\/LenovoPortal\/en_US\/catalog.workflow:category.details?current-catalog-id=12F0696583E04D86B9B79B0FEC01C087&amp;current-category-id=C2790FAB90184EB8A8E910C521C2274B\">Lenovo G-550<\/a> from Frys. (Yes, I&#8217;ve heard the customer-service horror stories already.) The main difference from the model on Lenovo&#8217;s site is that it moves from 2GB of higher-mhz memory to 3GB that&#8217;s lower for about the same price. Probably the right trade-off considering the rest of the build.<\/p>\n<p>So in terms of good and bad things&#8230;<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<h3>Good things<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Good performance\/price. \u00c2\u00a0It&#8217;ll choke on anything 3D, but that&#8217;s fine with me: It&#8217;ll keep me from playing games on it, and I&#8217;ve already got a desktop computer for games&#8230; The way the good lord intended.<\/li>\n<li>Screen is nice and bright. I would have preferred a matte rather than glossy finish, but so far it hasn&#8217;t bothered me.<\/li>\n<li>This isn&#8217;t a lap-burner. Warm, yes, but nothing compared to some other laptops that pretty much require an intermediate surface.<\/li>\n<li>I got a Logitech V220 cordless mouse. It works well and seems very well designed: Sliding the USB reciever into or out-of the base of the mouse automatically flips the on\/off switch, a feat which I found oddly impressive.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Solved issues<\/h2>\n<h3>Recovery Disks<\/h3>\n<p>Why didn&#8217;t Lenovo just ship the recovery disks for $5 more? You need to burn your own &#8220;factory image&#8221; recovery DVDs, and it&#8217;s best to do it ASAP.<\/p>\n<ul><\/ul>\n<h3>Touchpad drivers can be fixed<\/h3>\n<p>Based on some advice from the NewEgg reviews, I decided to install a different driver for the ALPS touchpad, a driver from Toshiba instead of the default that came with the laptop. It provides a lot more options, and allows me to automatically disable the touchpad when I connect an external USB mouse. (For anyone interested, it is labeled &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/askiris.toshiba.com\/ToshibaSupportSite\/search.do;jsessionid=F2E938EE86737586361247EF627CE0C5?cmd=displayKC&amp;docType=kc&amp;externalId=2395846xml&amp;sliceId=&amp;dialogID=103144057&amp;stateId=1%200%20103142588\">ALPS Pointing Device Driver for Windows Vista (32bit\/64bit)<\/a>&#8221; version\u00c2\u00a07.x5.303.105 and dated 07\/16\/09)<\/p>\n<h2>Unsolved issues<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>The webcam is servicable, but frankly my non-smartphone takes better pictures. Do <em>not<\/em> buy this laptop on the strength of it&#8217;s videoconferencing.<\/li>\n<li><strike>Adding injury to insult, the built-in microphone even worse.\u00c2\u00a0 (Listed as &#8220;Conexant High-Definition SmartAudio 221&#8221;.) I pretty much have to yell at it in order for it to register my voice, and that&#8217;s after jacking up all the software settings. Maybe it&#8217;s a driver issue that can be fixed, but out-of-the-box it&#8217;s useless and you&#8217;ll definitely want a &#8220;real&#8221; microphone you can plug in.<\/strike> Later testing shows it <b>does<\/b> work OK, but sometimes takes a while to &#8220;wake up&#8221; when recording, so it&#8217;s probably a driver issue that needs to be addressed. <\/li>\n<li>The &#8220;Fn&#8221; and control keys are swapped, so my usual copy\/paste reflexes are messed up. I can&#8217;t re-map the two, since the Fn key is managed in the laptop hardware.<\/li>\n<li>OS: Windows 7 Home Premium does not allow you to use Remote Desktop to access it. This is not a problem with the laptop, but just a gripe I have against how Microsoft cripples their OS. You can try VNC, but it tends to choke and die and kick you off whenever a User Account Control (UAC) window pops up, so keep an eye out for Windows-7-compatible VNC servers. (As of this writing TightVNC is not compatible.)<\/li>\n<li>The media keys (stop, pause, play, etc.) are very Microsoft-centric. They don&#8217;t work in any app that doesn&#8217;t have the foreground, <strong>except<\/strong> Windows Media player. And even then, it automatically starts and pops up WMP even if I don&#8217;t want it! I&#8217;m not the only one with this problem. I may use something like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.randyrants.com\/sharpkeys\/\">SharpKeys<\/a> to re-map them to something WMP doesn&#8217;t steal and then work on configuring everything else to pay attention to the new signals.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After a lot of trepidation, I managed to convince myself that I could use&#8211;nay, deserved&#8211;a laptop. One which would be cheap and portable, while still being powerful and comfortable enough for a two-hour coding binge at a local Starbucks. I ended up settling on a Lenovo G-550 from Frys. (Yes, I&#8217;ve heard the customer-service horror [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":210,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}