I've had this laptop for a couple of days now and figured I had enough info to warrant at least a preliminary review. Overall, I'm quite pleased so far. This is the first time I've gone for a 17" screen and my first impression when I unboxed the laptop was that it was lighter and bigger than I expected, roughly the same weight as my 15.4" business laptop. My second impression was that everything was glossy, from the case to the palm-rest area to the screen. And, like many glossy surfaces, you'll find that it will show fingerprints far too easily. Keep a soft cloth with your laptop if this is something that will bother you.
Setting up the laptop was routine. There was a little bloatware to get rid of (e.g., ooVoo and a couple of other forgettable apps) but nothing significant, and nothing like my last experience, a Sony Vaio laptop that was practically unusable because of all the crud that Sony had pre-installed that was practically bringing the system to its knees.
The laptop is generously configured, with 6 GB memory, a 750 GB hard drive, an Intel i5-2410 2.3 GHz CPU, an ATI Radeon HD 6650M graphics chip switchable with the built-in Intel Mobile graphics chip (more on that below), a 17" 1600x900 display, a 2.0MP webcam, and a Blu-Ray drive that plays Blu-Ray discs and allows you to both play and record CDs and DVDs. It also has three USB 2.0 ports and one USB 3.0 port (that the description above omits), along with an HDMI output port and a memory card slot that can accept SD, MMC, MS, MS Pro, and xD cards. The Windows Experience Index (Windows 7 64-bit) is:
Processor: 6.9
Memory: 7.5
Graphics: 6.7
Gaming graphics: 6.7
Primary hard disk: 5.9
You're not going to be playing the latest and greatest games on this laptop, at least not with everything maxed out, but it's definitely got enough horsepower to play some suitably tweaked or scaled-back games, if that's what you want. The slowest component in the laptop is the hard drive, probably because of the 5400 RPM speed. If you know what you're doing, you can always purchase and install a faster hard drive but for most of us, this is more than adequate.
Graphics: The G770 comes with two completely separate graphics processors, an Intel processor that comes with the motherboard and a separate ATI processor. The former doesn't offer nearly as good performance but it runs cooler and requires significantly less power, prolonging your battery life by as much as an hour. And for tasks like browsing the web and answering email, it's more than enough. The G770 comes with a Switchable Graphics capability that allows you to choose between the two processors, either on an individual application basis or powered vs. battery. In the latter case, when plugged in, the ATI processor has control; when you unplug your laptop, the Intel chip takes over. If you choose to configure graphics on a per-application basis, you can choose which processor should be active for any given application you run, so that you can keep the Intel processor for most activities but turn on the ATI processor for games or watching a Blu-Ray movie. The switch takes 3-5 seconds and does not require a system reboot. You can also manually switch at any time.
Display: In a word, gorgeous. This is the brightest display I've seen on a laptop since that aforementioned Sony Vaio. Even when plugged in, I'm running it with the brightness turned down a notch. The only minor nit is that it's a bit too reflective and susceptible to glare. If you're watching a movie with a lot of dim scenes, you may find yourself getting distracted by your own image reflected in the screen. Adjusting the screen to the right angle pretty much takes care of that, though.
Sound: The speakers are surprisingly good for a laptop, with sufficient oomph to give you a good experience when listening to music or movies, at least in a reasonably quiet room. In a noisy environment like an airplane or car, you're likely to need headphones but that's pretty typical for a laptop. To my untrained ears, the speakers have an acceptable high end and midrange but are a bit deficient in the bass range, just as you would expect from a laptop. My one complaint is that the speakers are on the underside of the laptop. The laptop underside is beveled, so the speakers aren't directly blocked but with the laptop on your lap, you may find that the sound is a bit muffled.
Battery life: The G770 uses a 6-cell lithium ion battery. My best guess now is that I'm averaging about 2.5 hours with normal use. I think Lenovo claims over 3 hours. Your mileage may vary. You can always purchase a spare battery directly from Lenovo, as the battery is easily swappable.
Keyboard: The keyboard is quite good but I do have some minor complaints. In order to squeeze in the separate numeric keypad, they had to reduce the width of the Enter key and the right Shift key. I found myself fairly regularly hitting the keys to the right of those keys. Also, the Insert, Delete, Home, End, etc., keys are in a single row across the top rather than in the usual stacked configuration. These are both trivial complaints, though.
Touchpad: The touchpad has a textured surface that surprised me at first and that took me a little while to get used to. I also found that I needed to run the utility to tweak the responsiveness of the pad, both in terms of reacting to tapping and to the movement of the cursor. It only took a few minutes to tweak both of these to my satisfaction. I would have liked the touchpad buttons to be raised a bit more, as I found myself occasionally hitting the bottom edge just below the buttons rather than the buttons themselves.
The G770 comes with the Lenovo Boot Optimizer utility that Lenovo claims can significantly reduce the startup time for the laptop. In practice, and somewhat to my surprise, I found that it really did make a difference, shaving 10 seconds off the startup time. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the laptop runs fairly cool. Even after several hours of playing around with it on my lap and using the ATI graphics processor, the bottom of the laptop remained cool. There was a bit of warm air from the exhaust on the left side but that was it.
The laptop also comes with the OneKey Recovery utility that will allow you to do a complete system backup. If you're going to use this, you should probably do so before you start installing your own software. By default, the system ships with a 30 GB partition of the main drive that you can use to store your backup. However, after I had installed Microsoft Office and a few other programs, I found that I would need a 50 GB partition to hold the resulting backup, which means that I couldn't take advantage of this.
Overall, as I said, I'm quite pleased. The G770 has sufficient power and capacity to be a true desktop replacement while also remaining light enough to carry around. With all of the extras, including the Blu-Ray player, the ATI graphics, the large hard drive, the USB 3.0 port, HDMI out, and so on, this is a lot of bang for the buck. I would have liked Lenovo to go with an 8-cell battery and a surface that wasn't quite so glossy and fingerprint-prone but these are minor nits. This is definitely worth a second look.
Update: At the time I purchased this laptop and wrote this review, Amazon was selling this laptop for $699. At the time of this update, it's only available through an Amazon partner for $830 and the $699 offer is nowhere to be found. At the former price, it's a steal. At the latter, it still might be worth it but it's definitely less compelling.
Setting up the laptop was routine. There was a little bloatware to get rid of (e.g., ooVoo and a couple of other forgettable apps) but nothing significant, and nothing like my last experience, a Sony Vaio laptop that was practically unusable because of all the crud that Sony had pre-installed that was practically bringing the system to its knees.
The laptop is generously configured, with 6 GB memory, a 750 GB hard drive, an Intel i5-2410 2.3 GHz CPU, an ATI Radeon HD 6650M graphics chip switchable with the built-in Intel Mobile graphics chip (more on that below), a 17" 1600x900 display, a 2.0MP webcam, and a Blu-Ray drive that plays Blu-Ray discs and allows you to both play and record CDs and DVDs. It also has three USB 2.0 ports and one USB 3.0 port (that the description above omits), along with an HDMI output port and a memory card slot that can accept SD, MMC, MS, MS Pro, and xD cards. The Windows Experience Index (Windows 7 64-bit) is:
Processor: 6.9
Memory: 7.5
Graphics: 6.7
Gaming graphics: 6.7
Primary hard disk: 5.9
You're not going to be playing the latest and greatest games on this laptop, at least not with everything maxed out, but it's definitely got enough horsepower to play some suitably tweaked or scaled-back games, if that's what you want. The slowest component in the laptop is the hard drive, probably because of the 5400 RPM speed. If you know what you're doing, you can always purchase and install a faster hard drive but for most of us, this is more than adequate.
Graphics: The G770 comes with two completely separate graphics processors, an Intel processor that comes with the motherboard and a separate ATI processor. The former doesn't offer nearly as good performance but it runs cooler and requires significantly less power, prolonging your battery life by as much as an hour. And for tasks like browsing the web and answering email, it's more than enough. The G770 comes with a Switchable Graphics capability that allows you to choose between the two processors, either on an individual application basis or powered vs. battery. In the latter case, when plugged in, the ATI processor has control; when you unplug your laptop, the Intel chip takes over. If you choose to configure graphics on a per-application basis, you can choose which processor should be active for any given application you run, so that you can keep the Intel processor for most activities but turn on the ATI processor for games or watching a Blu-Ray movie. The switch takes 3-5 seconds and does not require a system reboot. You can also manually switch at any time.
Display: In a word, gorgeous. This is the brightest display I've seen on a laptop since that aforementioned Sony Vaio. Even when plugged in, I'm running it with the brightness turned down a notch. The only minor nit is that it's a bit too reflective and susceptible to glare. If you're watching a movie with a lot of dim scenes, you may find yourself getting distracted by your own image reflected in the screen. Adjusting the screen to the right angle pretty much takes care of that, though.
Sound: The speakers are surprisingly good for a laptop, with sufficient oomph to give you a good experience when listening to music or movies, at least in a reasonably quiet room. In a noisy environment like an airplane or car, you're likely to need headphones but that's pretty typical for a laptop. To my untrained ears, the speakers have an acceptable high end and midrange but are a bit deficient in the bass range, just as you would expect from a laptop. My one complaint is that the speakers are on the underside of the laptop. The laptop underside is beveled, so the speakers aren't directly blocked but with the laptop on your lap, you may find that the sound is a bit muffled.
Battery life: The G770 uses a 6-cell lithium ion battery. My best guess now is that I'm averaging about 2.5 hours with normal use. I think Lenovo claims over 3 hours. Your mileage may vary. You can always purchase a spare battery directly from Lenovo, as the battery is easily swappable.
Keyboard: The keyboard is quite good but I do have some minor complaints. In order to squeeze in the separate numeric keypad, they had to reduce the width of the Enter key and the right Shift key. I found myself fairly regularly hitting the keys to the right of those keys. Also, the Insert, Delete, Home, End, etc., keys are in a single row across the top rather than in the usual stacked configuration. These are both trivial complaints, though.
Touchpad: The touchpad has a textured surface that surprised me at first and that took me a little while to get used to. I also found that I needed to run the utility to tweak the responsiveness of the pad, both in terms of reacting to tapping and to the movement of the cursor. It only took a few minutes to tweak both of these to my satisfaction. I would have liked the touchpad buttons to be raised a bit more, as I found myself occasionally hitting the bottom edge just below the buttons rather than the buttons themselves.
The G770 comes with the Lenovo Boot Optimizer utility that Lenovo claims can significantly reduce the startup time for the laptop. In practice, and somewhat to my surprise, I found that it really did make a difference, shaving 10 seconds off the startup time. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that the laptop runs fairly cool. Even after several hours of playing around with it on my lap and using the ATI graphics processor, the bottom of the laptop remained cool. There was a bit of warm air from the exhaust on the left side but that was it.
The laptop also comes with the OneKey Recovery utility that will allow you to do a complete system backup. If you're going to use this, you should probably do so before you start installing your own software. By default, the system ships with a 30 GB partition of the main drive that you can use to store your backup. However, after I had installed Microsoft Office and a few other programs, I found that I would need a 50 GB partition to hold the resulting backup, which means that I couldn't take advantage of this.
Overall, as I said, I'm quite pleased. The G770 has sufficient power and capacity to be a true desktop replacement while also remaining light enough to carry around. With all of the extras, including the Blu-Ray player, the ATI graphics, the large hard drive, the USB 3.0 port, HDMI out, and so on, this is a lot of bang for the buck. I would have liked Lenovo to go with an 8-cell battery and a surface that wasn't quite so glossy and fingerprint-prone but these are minor nits. This is definitely worth a second look.
Update: At the time I purchased this laptop and wrote this review, Amazon was selling this laptop for $699. At the time of this update, it's only available through an Amazon partner for $830 and the $699 offer is nowhere to be found. At the former price, it's a steal. At the latter, it still might be worth it but it's definitely less compelling.
Lenovo G770 10372KU 17.3-Inch Laptop (Dark Brown) (Personal Computers)
100 out of 100 based on 100 ratings. 100 user reviews.
100 out of 100 based on 100 ratings. 100 user reviews.
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