Lenovo IdeaPad 520S-14IKBR 14-Inch FHD Notebook - (Platinum) (Intel Core i7-8550U, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, Windows 10 Home)

It's a decent laptop for 500£, but far from perfect.My priorities were weight, screen, keyboard, and then battery, performance and price. And this delivers in MOST of them.What keeps it from being great is mostly the small 30Wh 2-cell battery it comes equipped with. And the sometimes noisy fan.There are versions of the Lenovo 520S with a 52.5Wh 3-cell battery which would make this particular model a lot better in my opinion.That said, here are my thoughts after a few weeks with it.PROS:1920x1080 matte IPS screen, no glossy crap.The keyboard feels great, even with the short key travel.i5-8250u performance (4 cores, 8 threads) nothing to say here.Fingerprint scanner works great with windows Hello.The speakers are really good for a laptop, was pleasantly surprised.Touchpad seems good enough, i prefer to use a mouse anyway.CONS:The battery is only 30Wh, not 40Wh (description is wrong). Lasts about 4 hours with light use only, very disappointing.Sometimes the fan turns on quite aggressively even when you aren't doing anything heavy, fortunately it doesn't remain noisy for long.The screen although nice enough, is not very bright. I have to use it at 80% or 90% brightness most of the time.For a 14" laptop model, it could be lighter at 1.7kgs.The keyboard has more than enough space for full sized arrow keys and for dedicated HOME and PAGE UP/DOWN keys, yet they are not there.RAM is single channel (only 1 stick).The included SSD is SATA3 not NVMe (although with good speeds for SATA3).No dedicated GPU, but Intel's HD Graphics 620 is more than enough for media and non graphics heavy work.

Had this laptop in use for a few months now, and it's fine. A big step up from my old Windows 8 machine. I have some minor quibbles: a.) the battery only lasts 2 hours max., but it still beats my old one by quite a stretch, b.) the fan does very occasionally get loud, but it really is occasional, and seems to only happen when the laptop's plugged into power or there's high CPU usage, and c.) there's no right-hand side number pad, but for my accents (I speak German, French and Scottish Gaelic) I just changed the keyboard in the laptop to German, which solved it. All in all, given that this machine cost me less than 400 quid, I'm happy, and this should do me fine for a few years.Usage: MS Office, YouTube, Zoom, Internet research, Wondershare Filmora. I don't use it for gaming.

I was not sure about buying a laptop with a SSD rather than a HDD, but very pleased with the SSD as it boots up very quickly and programs load quickly as well. I'm not so sure about the cover finish as its a satin faux metal and seems to mark easily. The key board is large for a mid size laptop as there is no numbers key pad on the right hand side, this suits me just fine.I feel based on the spec and the price its good value for money

A very nice laptop in all respects but the battery drains rapidly when the machine is switched off - at about 25% of when being used on battery. I can't work out whether this is due to the laptop design or Windows 10 (searching for updates? even when disconnected from the internet and powered down). As I don't plan to use it very far from a plug socket this shouldn't be a problem but people wanting portability may need to plan their use very carefully as the battery may be a quarter drained by the time they need to use the laptop later the same day of charging it.This really spoils an otherwise excellent machine, which is quick to load and has a nice to use keyboard. Looking at wider internet questions and comments from other users / owners about the battery drainage Lenovo doesn't appear to be too concerned about it despite user concerns.I chose Lenovo on past performance and experience of use of their machines. I did have battery drainage concern with a different previous model but this eased after a while. Fingers crossed for this one......

I really like this new laptop. The keyboard is clear and typing on it flows smoothly. I can't comment on battery life at the moment as it is new!!

Only a few weeks in but it's great! Super fast and the build quality is great. All the issues people report about the fan aren't actually an issue. It's an i7 processor so will need to use a fan to keep it cool. The battery life also isn't an issue. About 4hours if watching YouTube and 6 if just general use. Great product.

Be warned... description says '40Wh battery' but on the box it was only 30Wh! And after using for 2 hours it was down to 50%. My 5 year old laptop has a 37Wh battery for reference. No doubt this will deteriorate over time, forcing you to be tethered to the wall. Also screen brightness not great - needs to be around 70% to be readable. Fan makes quite a lot of noise when doing minimal tasks too. Other than those points was a good laptop for the price, especially 8th gen i5, 1080p screen and 256gb SSD. But for the terrible battery capacity/life I had to return it. If you can live with a charger constantly plugged in then definitely worth it at £500.

Love the speed of boot up and operation. Using it for easy document tasks and internet where it is really overkill - but its a pleasure to work with. Its light to carry - much more so than its predecessor, and a good clear screen. pleasure to work with.