This is an incredibly thorough review. Thank you!

i bought the u510 i7 ultrabook...hardly used it and now the battery is completely dead. after restoring to default settings, the smartscreen doesnt work now..it problems after problems with this one.

i just have problems with this ideapad.
combined with windows 8 its just crap!
the special mousepad does not work how it should be.
if u wanna upgrade your ram its not possible to open this ideapad without damage the case.
also i have problems with charging. if i gonna plug the ideapad to power it does not allways start charging the  battery, also power is off.
in my oppinion its absolutely not worth buy this ideapad also its really cheap.
lenovo fail.

I just bought this laptop 6 days ago and I already returning it! It cannot stay connected to wifi for longer than 10 minutes, no matter how close you are to the router. From day 2 of using this laptop, I have to continually disconnect and reconnect to my home wifi while watching anything. Depending on the site the wifi is dropped more quickly. It is so infuriating trying to watch a 1 hour long video and having to stop every 5-10 minutes to disconnect and reconnect and then have to reload the video and get back to the point i left. Everything else about this computer is beautiful! i love the touch pad even though everyone complains about it. (maybe because it is such an upgrade from the asus x55c mouse pad that filled me with a bloodcurdling fury). and the keyboard took me like one second to get used too. people who complain about that stuff must have come from owning the most state of the art computers. it seriously grieves my heart to see my beauiful u510 go back but if i cant stream my shows on my laptop... then i just have a very expensive paper weight sitting on my desk.

You are dead on and I'm glad I'm not imagining the keyboard give. Above the keyboard where the hinge is the plastic (?) housing is actually very slightly warped on the top right - barely noticeable but there. I had full intention to return it and even have my UPS return authorization labels. My concern was NO 1-800 customer relations number and waiting 1 hour on hold to get through to A/R on a billing error. There is actually NO ONE in North America - should I be surprised? I guess not.

But here's the thing, I brought home my replacement strategy - an iMac for at home and an iPad for mobility. Total price $2,600 Cdn with AppleCare on both. My IdeaPad U510 with an external DVD burner and 3 yr in home warranty was $1,100. I set up the iMac all excited with the Lenovo box ready for shipping back the IdeaPad.

What a minute!! Why is the iMac freezing? I'm trying to type in Hotmail and I'm about 20 strokes ahead waiting for the damn colour pinwheel to stop and catch up with me. I enter a different website - pinwheel and 15-30 wait. OK hold on - I just dropped $2,600 and I'm getting response from my brand new, just out of the box, iMAC like my 7 year old virus loaded Thinkpad was before it crashed?

The iMac is on the same desk as the Lenovo IdeaPad which is showing off by spitting out answers to my Google questions (about what's wrong with my freezing iMac)  - at warp speed!! So I'm reading AppleCommunity and they're talking about changing internet service provider router/modems for updated 'firmware'. And I'm thinking, really, maybe that's my problem - a 4 year old modem. But then I realize, my new IdeaPad is performing magnificently, my daughter's MacPro and her boyfriend's iPad all perform while I'm on my IdeaPad - none of us are having a problem. So what's the iMac's problem?

So, what's my point? Maybe I should keep this little aluminum non-Apple, beauty keyboard (LOVE the back lighting feature) humming along with out a problem, made in China - without human presence in Canada - laptop? I mean it is absolutely beating the pants of the brand new iMac. And I'm getting used to Windows 8 - QUANTUM leap and radical change - not without it's challenges. And they're showing a spiffy MSN new release for Windows 8 (but can I take anymore re-training right now?).

I'm 80 % sure it's the iMac and iPad going back. Well maybe I'll keep the iPad for light weight travelling. After all my concerns about my Lenovo, I'm glad I came across your article! It's a really nice and affordable laptop for home office use! If that's what your basic needs are, I would rate it a 10! As an ex-IBMer, I expect quality, reliability and excellence in customer service. Lenovo has failed in the latter, I'm really worried about servicing even with a 3 yr in home warranty. But maybe the quality and reliability is there. As far as being an Apple knock off, most laptops look alike. And I really can't see the point in paying almost $3,000 for an equivalent MacPro upgraded to the same spec with AppleCare & DVD burner.

Don, I have a u410 and unless Lenovo removed the feature from the u510, you can absolutely change the function key to single stroke in the BIOS.

I have to agree with this evalutation of the Lenovo Ultrabook U510.  The Keyboard layout cannot be rated very high because the function keys do not work unless the Fn key is also held down to activate these keys.  Function Keys are meant to be single stroke functions. When did the designers think that pressing two keys would be acceptable.   Bad news for me is that both Lenovo and Window 8 folks tell me there is no way to reverse the meaning of these function keys to get back a single stroke function key action.   Losing site of who might use this laptop is not a good thing.