If you're another person who gazed eyes upon the Lenovo THINKPAD series, I guess you have a good taste for laptops, but you might think again of buying one of those for the following problems were never mentioned in forums/Lenovo support pages. So here they are:
1.) DRIVER CRAZY
Usually, you get a Thinkpad E series nowadays with pre-installed Windows 7 or 8 depending on your retailer. In my case, I bought a fresh DOS based Lenovo Thinkpad E330 w/ Core i3 2Gb RAM and 500Gb HDD without a pre-installed OS. That means that I installed all the software from scratch.
After I installed windows 7 OS on it, I needed the drivers to make it work. Too bad, they were not included in the package. So I tried downloading some essential drivers on my older PC for my Thinkpad cannot connect to the internet at that time due to the lack of drivers.
However, the drivers were too difficult to install. First, you need to download an ethernet/LAN driver from another computer so that you could access the internet via ethernet/LAN port in your Thinkpad. By the way, I also tried installing the wifi driver but that screwed things up. The wifi drivers from the Lenovo Thinkpad's site were not working. Later, I read in some forums that downloading the System Update and installing all other drivers from there could resolve these issues, but it was not that smooth.
Just as I thought. System Update from Lenovo installed some strictly windows 8/8.1 compatible drivers on my computer instead of Windows 7 drivers which were about 500Mb+, and it didn't install some essential drivers/programs like the built in SD card reader driver, Audio drivers, and the Lenovo power manager so that the On Screen Display (OSD) could work properly. So there I went downloading the latest built in SD card adapter driver, Sound driver, communications utility and power manager from their site. Good thing that those drivers worked.
2.) LENOVO SOFTWARE MALFUNCTION
Usually, the power manager MUST be installed with the OSD (On Screen Display) program which would display the volume, brightness of the screen, etc. of the laptop when you tweak one setting in your laptop. For example, hitting Fn+F7 would decrease the brightness of the screen and Fn+F8 would be the opposite. Without the Power Manager, the OSD for the brightness won't display on the screen, so you really need to install the Lenovo power manager in order for it to work smoothly.
After installing the Lenovo power manager, it seemed like the laptop was more efficient in power saving/ performing with working OSDs..WRONG! I usually got bugs that cannot be fixed like the sudden disconnection of internet signal may it be from wifi or ethernet/LAN cable (even in different browsers), but after uninstalling the Lenovo power manager it fixed the issue. Good thing that the OSD for the screen brightness is still working without the power manager software, and the sudden internet disconnection issue is no longer existing.
Next is the Lenovo Airbag or a software which claims that it 'protects' your computer . When the computer detects that it would shake / fall, it will immediately place your hard drive in standby/idle mode or It would turn off the hard drive prior to the impact/ shake. However, this program just stressed my hard drive A LOT. After 4 months of careful use of the laptop, the hard drive broke with the Click of Death.
A lot of people said that it was because of my 2Gb ram so the computer would take some space in the hard drive, stressing it out, but in my experience with laptops , it won't lead the hard drive to a corruption or the 'click' of death as fast as 4 months., and I wasn't really shaking the laptop. I was only moving it slowly just like when I was change tables/ moving the lid or such.
So after that tragic event of losing all files, I decided that I should buy a new hard drive, and that time, I reinstalled the OS, drivers once again, but this time, without the Airbag protection from Lenovo.
It has been 7 months since that breakdown of my previous hard drive and my current hard drive is still kicking.
CONCLUSION
Overall, the lenovo thinkpad just like mine, no pre-installed OS and without the drivers DVD, is difficult to set up. Please do consider that the laptop you're about to touch is not an easy tool. It may be powerful and neat, but the difficulty is just stressful to the extent that you'll lose sleep. Also, be keen that the Power Manager and Airbag protection of the Lenovo are not perfectly safe. Use them at your own risk, but those softwares could improve, but I'm not too confident to use it again as of this time.
I hope people out there won't experience this. Thinkpad E series.. lightweight..cool..sleek..matte finish....but with some great drawbacks. Think wisely in buying one of these kinds of laptops especially the ones without pre installed OS or drivers.
