Well it’s been about 3 months since I bought my Lenovo Legion Y740. You can read my first impressions in my “A week with the Lenovo Legion Y740” post.
First I want to say that most of my opinions have not changed. I like this machine, and I do not regret the purchase at all. The BIOS pin-hole I mentioned in the last post still boggles my mind, but I don’t need to use it often so it’s not a problem. The Keyboard is still neat, but as I expected the Lenovo auto-updater keeps asking me to update to the firmware that introduces the super-annoying rainbow effect default. I keep rejecting it.
On the Fedora front, I did finally get Fedora installed. I found a how-to online on how to switch the disk access mode from RST, and then reconfigure windows to use ACHI. I did not lose any data, or have to reinstall windows. #win
That being said, I’m doing my best to reach a weekly video release goal on SWBCrawler, and that’s forcing me to stay in Windows most of the time, as it takes me a few days to edit a video, and at the end of the week I’m starting the process all over again. So, I am not using Fedora nearly as often as I once did. Which is unfortunate. I prefer Fedora for many reasons, not just because of where I work, but I genuinely prefer the interface, and utilities at my disposal. Unfortunately Adobe’s creative suite is a no-go on Fedora. If anyone has sane alternatives for Adobe’s Premiere on Linux, I’m all ears.
I did take some time to play some more games on this machine, I continue to be impressed by the graphics capabilities. Still nothing cutting edge, but I played some Fallout 4, which has higher graphics demands than Doom (2016), but still nothing insane.
I am a tad disappointment with my dock experience though. I have a Lenovo Thinkpad dock, that was provided to me with my office laptop. On my Thinkpad, its literally one USB-C connection and all of my peripherals, and even power, are connected. I’m in the habit of shutting down that machine at the end of the workday, and sticking it in my laptop bag. Then putting my personal laptop in its place. The dock… works, but is very unstable, on my Legion Y740. It’ll work for everything except power. Then at seemingly random times I’ll lose peripherals. The display is fine, but mostly my USB and Ethernet connections will get flaky. I have not dug into it, but it definitely seems like the Legion Y740 and this dock are not fully compatible. It would be VERY nice if I could simply undock my Thinkpad, and dock my Y740 at the end of the day, but so far, that has not been the case. I have to move all of my peripherals from the dock to the back of the Y740 every time I swap machines. I can live with this, but it sure would be nice.
And, so far, that’s it! Overall I still like the laptop. I have not had much reason to take in places, and it’s mostly been used on my desk connected to my external keyboard, monitor, and trackball, but I have used it few times mobile, and I like the feel of the keys and track pad. The pad doesn’t get in my way while I’m typing which is important to me. The keyboard back-light is fun, the kids love the echo effect ;).
Would I buy this laptop again? Yea, I think so, but I would definitely love t have my internal SD Card reader back. If i were buying again, I’d pay closer attention to that.
Thanks for reading!