I’ve recently bought ten of these for some of our road warriors. We’re an HP shop, but I like the fact that these are both cheap and come with an embedded Gobi WWAN (wireless wide area network) modem. This means we install 3G sim cards into a slot on the laptop (its behind the battery), rather than mess around with USB dongles. As well as being neater, its supposed to give a better signal, as it provides more power than a USB connection does. HP do similar models, but only at the higher end of their range, and I don’t need a high spec laptop for Excel sales reports, customer Powerpoint presentations, and E-mail.
Setting them up was generally dead easy. But I wanted to install Windows 7 Ultimate edition on three of the machines. This required me to do a clean install, as the upgrade didn’t appear to work. After installing, I downloaded Lenovo’s System Update software, and this downloaded and installed all the required drivers. This worked perfectly on two of the machines. But today I tried to do the third machine and it didn’t seem to install half the required software. This may be because the Lenovo driver download website is “under maintenance” at the moment. The main problem was getting the Intel graphics driver to install. I tried and tried and it wouldn’t work. In the end, I downloaded an earlier version of the driver from Dell’s website (of all places), and this worked. Downloading and installing drivers is one of the most frustating aspects of working with machines.
Carnival Boy 