I needed a new laptop after my HP was pooping the bed. I've had it for about 3 days of heavy use and I will give you the positives and negatives, and overall impressions.

Positive: Big screen, big keyboard, fast (after cleanup, which I will get to in a bit), good battery life, fan runs very quietly.
Negative: Mouse pad is glitchy at times, bloatware, plastic shell and finish stain and feel uncomfortable at times.

Overall this laptop exceeded my expectations. I have the i3, so I was worried there would be a significant performance drop from the higher core models. I have several windows and programs running simultaneously, and the computer is still lightning fast. You will like this laptop if you want a large laptop at a low price point. Being a grad student and running a business I needed a laptop with a big screen so I can "snap" all my windows and view them all at once. This screen is big enough to use microsofts snap feature effectively. This is a good laptop if you need to be productive, and I recommend it for a student or business man. The laptops materials feel cheap, and stain very easily, but I don't care about that as much as others might.

There are many comments about the bloatware, superfish in particular, and I will talk about my experiences. This computer comes with A TON of bloatware, which can take up precious space, and slow down the computers performance. The very first thing I did was download free malwarebytes, and it instantly found 79 issues. Keep in mind this was without any internet surfing, or importing any other software or programs other than malwarebytes. Online articles recommend using a program called PC decrapifier to clean out the PC but I would advise against this. Unless you really know what your doing, taking this programs advice can cause serious performance effects on the pc, because you could uninstall drivers or software that could actually benefit the computer. PC decrapifier also does a poor job of actually removing the software. Your best bet is to go into control pannel and manually uninstall programs you know are bloatware. After I ran malwarebytes and did a manual uninstall of all the bloatware, the computer was lightning fast and clean as a whistle.

Understand that with lower end computer models the margins for companies are incredibly low, which are why some companies are exiting the laptop market. Companies like lenovo pack their computer with bloatware because the developers of these programs pay lenovo big money to be featured on the website at launch. So while this can hurt computer performance, it's done to make the price point lower to the end user, so you would be paying a lot more for this machine without it. The good news is, all of it can be taken off. The entire process takes about an hour and a half, and make sure you malwarebytes is the first thing you run before doing anything else.

Out of the box, the laptop just needs some TLC, but after that it's a great machine for it's price point. Keep in mind if you want to run taxing software such as photoshop you may want to upgrade to the i5 model or higher. As i stated before,

Be warned.If you use this computer out of the box without cleaning it up you are giving away your personal info to God knows who in God knows where.It is a shame that an otherwise decent computer is crippled out of the box in this fashion.If you are not familiar with removing extensive and invasive software then I would not purchase this.I certainly will not purchase another Lenovo product after this.

Since I immediately installed an SSD drive before even the first start-up, I cannot comment about how well the computer works "out of the box", but I will say it's been very fast for me (again, I do have an SSD installed which makes a tremendous difference in responsiveness of the machine). Boot times average 5-7 seconds from completely off to the Windows login screen and most programs launch almost instantly.

Compared to my aging 17" MacBook Pro which was an amazing machine six years ago, the Lenovo G50 by comparison feels flimsy and cheap. I suppose you do get what you pay for in the end. I also can't imagine this Lenovo laptop lasting over six years -but hey, I only had to pay a fraction of the price for this Lenovo compared to my MacBook Pro.

The Lenovo G50's trackpad feel and usage leaves a bit to be desired. I don't care much for the somewhat "gritty" texture of the trackpad surface and it can be jittery at times when trying to move your finger precisely. This isn't normally a problem, but if you're used to a good trackpad you might be disappointed. My biggest complaints are screen quality and battery life. Viewing angles of the screen are subpar, the color gamut is pretty poor and the resolution is not all that good. As a laptop, it's usable for Internet or text and document use, but I won't be using it for Lightroom or Photoshop anytime soon. Battery life is a bit underwhelming as well. It has enough juice to last a little over three hours on the go, but if you've got a lot of work to do you'd better bring your charger.

Graphics on this Lenovo G50 aren't too shabby for a budget laptop. It uses the integrated Intel HD4400 graphics which I'd say is about on-par with my 2009 MacBook Pro's NVIDIA 9600GT discrete graphics card. Playing Minecraft, I've been averaging around 45-55 FPS with 'fancy settings' enabled. In fact, it actually performs slightly better than my old MacBook did.

For you Linux geeks out there who might be concerned whether or not the Lenovo G50 is a good option need not worry. Ubuntu 15.04 operates perfectly on this machine as-is without any modifications necessary. Wi-Fi, Trackpad, sleep/resume all worked fine. I have Ubuntu setup to dual boot alongside Windows for the best of both worlds. While I cannot guarantee every Linux distro will perform with ease on the G50, it's a good bet you won't have too many problems with the distro flavor you decide to use.

Overall I'd say the G50 is decent if you're simply looking for a full-sized, inexpensive laptop. Nothing about this Lenovo G50 is going to blow you away as being excellent, however, it doesn't need to at such a cheap price. This computer was made for the average user in mind. Somebody who's shopping with low cost in mind. It serves my purpose as an Ok secondary computer since I have a powerful desktop PC with a fantastic display as my main computer. If you are looking to buy a laptop as your full-time use PC then I would recommend stepping it up to something better to avoid some of the annoyances this laptop has.

- Intel Core i3-4030U 1.9 GHz Processor
- 4 GB RAM
- 1 TB 5400 rpm Hard Drive

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