Review of Lenovo T580 ThinkPad laptop for tax practice

Last month I purchased a T580 ThinkPad Laptop Machine Type Model 20L9CTO1WW, directly from Lenovo at a price of about $1,500 as customized, with tax and delivered. The machine is meant to be my primary accounting practice machine. This is my first ThinkPad after about 20 years of using comparable but less expensive primarily HP ProBook machines. The machine was shipped directly from China and I began using it on September 19, 2018.

Overall, ThinkPad has the speed, capacity, and features necessary to do the job as expected. But I found a list of shortcomings disturbing enough that I am already looking  for an alternative after only about two weeks of use. My issues:

1) This machine has only 2 USB ports, both on the right side of the machine. Naturally, the printers I use are to the left of my desk without enough cable length to reach around. Longer cables are now on my shopping list. With one printer connected and an external drive, the machine is already at cap IMO, a work laptop needs 4 USB ports. The Lenovo sales representative misrepresented this feature in a recorded chat session.

2) The keyboard is not back-lit. That is a problem for night work (which happens way too often especially during tax season). This is an essential feature for me so I can work without waking family members with other light in the room. Again, the Lenovo sales representative misrepresented this feature.

3) This ThinkPad has only one drive bay. The duel drive bay feature was the primary reason I was drawn to the ThinkPad brand over others. I was looking forward to a machine with a HDD and a SSD. A substantial part of my purchase activity and chat was focused on the second drive bay. Again, the Lenovo sales representative misrepresented this feature.

4) Battery life is shorter than expected. I get 4 hours work time unplugged until the warning message appears. That’s hardly enough time to do data entry on a case when I work from my living room. I had hoped to get through almost a full day unplugged.

Had correct technical information been available to me, I would not have purchased this model.


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  1. […] Thinkpad T580 notebook computer and by now I now have at least a thousand hours of use on it. I reviewed it last October in another log post here. This is a short bullet point update of that review now, […]

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