I’m looking at a Lenovo V15 G3 IAP 15.6" Laptop. I need it for web surfing, Paint Shop Pro (may upgrade to Photoshop), and Ms. Word. I want to have graphics and Word programs and several internet tabs open at the same time.
All of the models have 16 GB ram. It’s a choice between the Intel 17-1255u and AMD Ryzen 7 7730U, and 512 GB versus 1 TB SSD.
Thanks for any thoughts.
I can’t speak to the processors, not being that techie, but especially for someone doing image processing, I would definitely pick the 1TB drive. You’ll want more storage, and more room for virtual memory can’t hurt.
Modern Intel chips have flaws that drastically shorten their lifespans. The current fix has been incompletely successful although less is known about the more recent attempts.
All else being equal, I’d stick with AMD. The Intel issue was bad enough, but they tried to pass the buck for years before finally coming clean on it.
Get the AMD because of what ParallelLines says.
Also, is there any particular reason you want this laptop? It seems like a pretty generic laptop (which is fine, since the apps you mentioned are pretty generic). But this being Black Friday and such, you can get cheaper laptops, more powerful laptops, etc. Why this one in particular?
If you’re at all open to considering it – and it’s fine if you’re not – a Macbook costs not much more, and is a much much better laptop than any Windows laptop you can currently get. By a lot. That wasn’t always the case (and may not stay that way forever), but right now no Windows laptop comes close. Paint Shop Pro isn’t on Mac, but the similar Pixelmator is.
If you don’t want a Mac, the Lenovo Thinkpads are generally better computers than the generic Lenovos, especially if you want something more repairable over the mid-long-term, and they offer in-house support & parts replacements for an additional charge.
But for the apps you describe, basically any modern laptop will do.
Thank you, Seanette. Unfortunately, the 1TB doesn’t come with many of the models I’m considering. 
Thank you for talking me into the AMD!
What do you think of this:
ThinkBook 16 Gen 7
AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS
16 BG
512 GB
$684.61
It’s not a Black Friday sale price. 
I wonder if I’d get a better deal
closer to Christmas?
Just found this:
ThinkBook 15 G4 ABA
AMD Ryzen 7 5825U 2
16 GB, 512 GB
$528.49 Not a Black Friday deal, either.
Are these models better built than the generic Lenovos?
Would I notice the difference between the 7 5825U and 7 7735HS?
Well…that depends. I’ve got two Lenovo Ideapad 3s in various states of disrepair (the housings are not really designed to be sturdy and popped open all that often), and an old ThinkPad T480 I bought refurbished which runs Windows 10 Pro (pre-installed) like a champ, and as one of the partitions holds Arch linux (my daily driver), with a small Xubuntu partition as a backup/recovery/investigation and for doing some other stuff.
The T480 is IIRC a 2018 vintage model (not the year mine was made, but the design and roll-out, about then). Far superior.
The Thinkpad uses set screws (well, whatever they’re called) to secure the bottom plate of the housing, which is convenient…don’t have to bother with putting back a bunch of screws nor putting them in empty pill bottles or whatever one’s system. Keyboard is far nicer. Includes the classic “nipple” pointer I remember from back in the 1990s…TBH, I never use it.
The Thinkpad’s housing is not even comparable in quality to the Ideapads. Better, by leaps and bounds. As are the keyboard and the trackpad.
SDD drive size? I wouldn’t worry about…crunch the numbers, and if it makes sense monetarily, buy the size drive you want, pop it inside, and voilà, the old internal smaller capacity driver is now instantly a backup drive or one for media or whatever…probably need to buy a sub $10 US enclose to use the extra SSD.
Or not!
/* EDIT…I do know that many Lenovo notebook computers include an extra SATA interface plus some dummy space inside if you wanted to include a second HDD inside the notebook. I’ve never bothered to do that, but it likely’s possible if you desire. */
Thank you, Strenger. But what do you think of ThinkBooks?
Incidentally, I have a ThinkPad that I bought refurbished in 2016, and
it’s still doing great. But I have a specific preference for a kind of display that the newer ThinkPads don’t offer.
Haven’t got a clue, man! Never tried nor used.
Gotcha. Yeah, I can’t speak to that…quick plug for KDE Plasma, who do DPI scaling better than XFCE…
I wouldn’t be surprised if ThinkPads OOTB didn’t offer great experiences for video gamers or movie aficiandos.
But, as you know, they’re built like tanks.
And related to your question, there’s a bunch of T480 nerds out there who have replaced their stock screens to 4K and all that, but I think you’d prefer something out of the box that does the tasks.
Thanks again.
Are you buying these direct from Lenovo? They usually let you choose the type of screen if you customize a build rather than buying a prebuilt.
Also, depending on what exactly you want, sometimes a good screen protector can really help (to reduce glare, etc.) I added a Photodon film to my glare-y Macbook and it’s much more usable now, especially in daylight.
You still haven’t really said what you’re looking for in a laptop either, what your budget and priorities are, etc. If you want something to last you a bit longer, get a ThinkPad and pay for the business level support, at-home if possible (so you don’t have to ship it back and forth).
Your needs are generic enough that any modern hardware will do fine, especially 16 GB of RAM and above. It comes down to build quality and support, if you want either. ThinkPads are better built than most consumer laptops but still nowhere near perfect; I’ve had several break on me in several ways (usually display or hinge related) and Lenovo has had to come out to replace parts multiple times, sometimes on the same machine. The at-home service made it ok (they come out and fix it in an hour or two), otherwise I would’ve been outta luck for a couple weeks while waiting for shipping.
Their quality is still nowhere near modern Macbooks, either in materials (especially the lighter X models are thin and bendy carbon fiber & plastic), workmanship (body was kinda warped out of the factory and never sat completely straight, though it functioned fine) or performance (Intel and AMD are quite a bit behind the Apple Silicon stuff and they’re kinda desperately trying to catch up but have quite a way to go).
On the lighter X models, battery life and heat management tend to be poor for any sort of sustained heavy usage – Paint Shop Pro is probably fine, unless you’re doing continuously doing a lot of heavy filters and processing on super high res photos. But if you want a workhorse rather than something superlight, the T series workstations might be better than the X series.
ThinkPads are better work & business machines than many others, but if this is going to be your daily driver, personally I still would not count on reputation alone and invest either in a backup computer or better warranty support. They do break.
Dell’s Latitude line is similar to ThinkPads in a lot of ways, right down to copying the red nipple (except theirs is blue). Keyboards feel similar too, and they often have different displays to choose from too.
Generally speaking, this segment of the market is called SMB (small/medium business laptop market), and Dell and Lenovos make some of the better ones.
If budget isn’t the primary factor for you, I’d try to spend a little higher than the $500-$700 range you’re looking at because that’s where all the “race to the bottom” laptops are. If you spend a few hundred dollars more you can get a much better product, either a proper ThinkPad (not the ThinkBooks, which look like just a marketing gimmick to confuse people on purpose because of their similar names) or my vote would still be a Macbook unless you specifically don’t want that.
You don’t necessarily need a current-year laptop, either, to be frank. If you can find a refurb or an older model (within 3-4 years, say), it can run all the things you mentioned just fine.
Best Buy often has open-box laptops too (with warranty and return periods), and their in-store-only deals can be especially good (compared to what you can see online). People always buy laptops without really knowing what they need and the returns often are in like-new condition, and because these things are just commodities, they don’t have much of a shelf life. You can save hundreds of dollars on a several-month old laptop that someone else used for a week. I’ve gotten many great laptops this way, including the Mac I’m still using five years later. One plus side is that you get to play with them in-store (since they’re already open) to make sure you like the keyboard, touchpad, build quality, display, etc.
Unless you’re specifically trying to find a laptop at this particular price point at this particular moment, I’d encourage you to think about it a little longer and decide what you’re really looking for. If a few hundred dollars won’t make or break the bank for you, it can make a huge difference in the quality you’ll get.
Thank you for such an informative response! I have a lot of thinking
to do.
I just bought a MacBook pro, and while I’m happy with my purchase (well, i haven’t unboxed it, yet, it arrived last night. But no regrets yet.) one thing to beware of with Mac laptops, and maybe Max hardware in general, is that you can’t upgrade any of the internals. You want a bigger hard drive? Pay inflated prices to get it built in. Same with RAM. Hell, it’s hard to replace the battery. (Although you can pay Apple to do that.) One upside of that is that you don’t have Macs fail because the RAM chip came loose (used to be pretty common on PCs). But there are obvious downsides.
For a slight hijack, I’m curious about:
I may want a copy of that.
Also, a warning about the erasorhead pointing device in the center of some keyboards: I used to love that. So handy, so precise, never run out of space to push further. Then i developed wrist pain. I find them an ergonomic disaster. I mostly use touch pads, and if i need finer control, i use a mouse. I miss the erasorhead, but I’m happy my hands still work.
I’m probably going to sell a lightly used 3 year old M1 MacBookpro in a few weeks, but that’s probably not on your time scale. And i don’t want to make any promises. But if you are interested in buying used phones and popular laptops, I’ve been really happy with Swappa, which is where I’ve bought a couple of things, sold a couple of things, and plan to sell my laptop, after I’m done moving in. (I may wait until after Jan 20, and see if there are tariffs that increase the value of my old hardware.)
Oh, also, my current Mac is still a really powerful, healthy, useful machine. I’m upgrading it now because i need more, but because when i bought it, there were promises of a faster, more energy efficient 3nm chip “coming soon”, and i bought this one fully intending to upgrade when that came out, which i expected to be in a year or two. It’s taken 3 years to fulfill that promise. But I’m being indulgent. There’s no world where i need to upgrade this machine. My experience with Macs is that they work for years. I had my people one for about 7+ years, and it’s obsolete now, due to everything needing more power, but it was still a competent machine when i replaced it. (I did replace it’s battery once.)
I’ve had both Mac and Windows laptops and desktops. IMHO - if you (as suggested by @puzzlegal) buy with sufficient assets to future proof in mind, they’re overall better machines, but pricier. My biggest issue with Macs is that they go through generations (computer generations that is) of overdoing style to the detriment of substance, the much lower release percentages of games and cost (although with streamed games, that’s slightly less of an issue), and, yeah, the difficulty of updates. Actually almost all software suffers a bit from availability and cost, but once again, web apps may be your friend!
But IMHO, if you don’t game, and buy right, the years-functional to cost are on the better side for Macs.
My favorite system was the iMac I had for years which supported a dual boot system. I used the Mac side for everything but games, and the Windows partition worked smoothly for my games. And when I finally replaced it as my main system, it got another 2-3 years as my early Plex server.
FYI, Apple just bought that company/app, so maybe it’ll be integrated into the OS in the future? Who knows.
I still have a Mac from the 1980’s. I haven’t used it in years, but it brings
back fond memories.
I had not heard of the Intel issues. We’re hoping to order a new computer today and most of the units are Intel versus AMD.
If I can piggyback on this thread: Our existing machine is a small desktop. I did some digging through email and it’s over 7 years old. An i5 chip, and it’s gotten unacceptably slow. We don’t actually use it all that much - just for a few things we can’t or don’t want to do on our work laptops - but with both of us approaching retirement we want something.
We don’t do intensive stuff, so from what I can tell, another i5 chip should be sufficient. We may actually stick with a similar amount of hard drive space and RAM, as it’s done okay for us - assuming the updated chip will. speed things up (bad assumption?). Biggest things we’d need the space for are Quicken and our Calibre (ebook) library; I’ll double check usage on the current machine.
Biggest qualm is the size. I’ve got two work laptops, the “little Lenovo that can’t any more”, plus all the peripherals, on a wire shelving rack. Everything shares a keyboard/mouse/monitor via a KVM switch. I’m. leaning toward a Dell XPS, but those are larger and will not fit, nor do we have another good spot to put it at the moment (once the work computers go away, so does that problem); the Inspirons come in a smaller form that would fit but I get a sense that those are more entry-level and won’t serve as well?
On the other hand, that might be okay… once we no longer have work laptops, we’d have room for our own laptops, so we could just replace it?
Well, if you want quicken, you will need a pc running Windows. So that’s a starting point. No Macs, no Linux boxes. Although my husband moved from quicken to GnuCash (i think that’s what it’s called) when quicken stopped supporting macos. He has both a Mac and a Linux machine.
(Calibre runs on most anything.)
14" is my sweet spot and I’m reluctantly passing on this deal, I simply can’t justify a new computer right now ($649/shipped):