Lenovo IdeaPad Y450 Now Available

Lenovo has released the IdeaPad Y450, a 14-inch laptop for consumers.

The IdeaPad Y450 is a smaller sibling of the Y650 and the upcoming Y550. The new laptop features Intel’s Pentium or Core 2 Duo processor, GMA 4500MHD integrated graphics or the NVIDIA GeForce G 105M 256MB dedicated video card, up to 4GB of DDR3 memory, up to 320GB of hard drive space, a DVD burner, 802.11n WiFi, and a Bluetooth module in one of the offered models.

The 14″ LED backlight display has a resolution of 1366×768 pixels and a 16:9 aspect ratio.

According to Lenovo’s earlier announcement, the Y450 also features Dolby Home Theater surround sound, a web camera, and a multi-touch touchpad.

The latpop starts at $679.00 at the Lenovo website.

I ordered the Lenovo Y450 (model 418938U). A nice-looking laptop, and seems to work OK for the most part, except that the wrist-rest area gets very hot during usage. I’m not talking about warm, I’m talking hot. It was so uncomfortable I decided to call tech support and report the problem. The tech support guy said “they are all like that”. I’ve never used a laptop that got so hot.

I will also add that when I was going through the personalization features, the Windows Vista explorer would stop responding, and I had to shut it down and restart. This isn’t a good sign either, especially since this was supposedly a very powerful machine with the Core 2 Duo processor.

I called the sales department, and they said I would have to pay to ship the unit back + pay a 15% restocking fee (I have to pay because they don’t consider the unit to be faulty). All that for the priviledge of trying out their machine for less than 24 hours. So I’m sending it back, and my only hope is to dispute the restocking fee with my credit card.

The rest of you can take your chances, but honestly I will never do business with this company again. Their poorly designed (or faulty) product ended up costing me $100 to try out for a single day. You’ve been warned.