Pros: This Lenovo Thinkpad was clean and unblemished -- very little evidence of wear and tear in previous use. With an SSD and 16 MB of RAM, the machine is quite responsive under Windows 10. This an i7, though only 3rd generation, but there is plenty of power for ordinary web browsing and office use. The original conventional harddrive would have been a weak point at this point in the computer's life, so replacing with an SSD is reassuring as to durability as well as a performance enhancement. There are two USB 3.0 ports. The Lenovo website provided bios, firmware and driver updates, many with dates in 2018 and 2019 -- support for this model from Lenovo is apparently quite good. This model has not been abandoned by its maker quite yet, though obviously it is way out of warranty. The price is less than half what you would pay, minimally, for comparable performance in a new laptop.

Cons: The laptop is thick and fairly heavy by 2019 standards when a new laptop is thin-and-light in extremis. I like to think it feels solid, but I guess it also feels a bit clunky. I do not mind, but others more sensitive to design as style might not like it. The SSD is a Zheino from China -- I have not benchmarked it, but the "feel" is excellent. Still not a "brand" like Samsung and as far as I can tell, without the usual SSD "tools" that come with a brand, like Samsung Magician software. The built-in wireless adapter is the Centrino wireless-N 2200, which is single-band 2.4 GHz. So performance on wireless has been fine, but I may get a USB 3.0 network device to access 5.1 GHz. Windows 10 was installed: there was already a User account even, which made startup simple enough. Pretty much no updating of the Lenovo drivers or Windows 10 had been accomplished. The Lenovo website provided bios, firmware and driver updates: still, it was a bit of a project to update the Windows May 2019 (1903) plus all the many Lenovo updates plus miscellaneous third-party apps. (Ninite helped) Still even as I was writing this, I thought to check again for Windows and Intel updates, and sure enough: more!!! So, be forewarned on the necessity of investing time in setup.

Overall Review: Overall, I am quite pleased. Of course, a big part of what pleases me is the price: under $400 and paying only that for a computer which may not be new, but which is fast and responsive -- not sluggish as any $400 new laptop would be. I like the solid feel, but I think many would be distressed by its unstylish clunkiness. ymmv, in other words

Pros: I was building a system with an Intel DP55WB motherboard, with no legacy EIDE slots, and had second thoughts, wanted to salvage a couple of hard drives and a DVD-RW. Doesn't slow the boot much. A good combination of additional capabilities.

Cons: As the other review notes, the placement of the EIDE ports is less than ideal. In my system, they effectively block use of the other PCI-E x1 slot. The driver provided by the manufacturer is also outdated, and doesn't work well with Win7. I had to get the chipset maker's driver from JMicron, but figured that out, only after a lot of aggravation.

Overall Review: I bought the card, in order to ease the transition, after building a new PC on a motherboard without legacy EIDE ports. I wanted to just add the drives from the old computer, and not copy over voluminous data on them. I didn't boot to a drive connected to the card or use the card's RAID capability. I haven't used its external E-SATA port either. I had a lot of trouble getting the card to recognize both of my harddrives, set up as master and slave. I struggled with setting the pins on the drives, but eventually gave up, and discarded on harddrive, leaving one harddrive and one DVD-burner drive, each on its own EIDE controller. This may be more a criticism of my drives, or my understanding of master and slave pins -- tg SATA doesn't do that nonsense!

Pros: The price was right -- this may have been my mistake. The case is spacious and is well-prepared to accept a lot of fans. The placement of front controls facing the top of the case is very handy, if plan on placing this tower case on the floor.

Cons: The USB outlets at the front of the case have been problematic. The USB 3.0 port often reports a short and is effectively unusable as a result -- I try and hope because it is handy, but often end up at the back of the case fishing in the dark for an empty USB port. The scheme for mounting conventional harddrives on a vertical panel is of questionable utility. This would not be a great case, if you have multiple conventional harddrives.

Overall Review: I would not buy this case again.

Pros: Six cores! Amazing. 65W Also amazing. And I did not need water cooling -- the stock cooler is more than adequate in a well-ventilated case. Although I put it on a microATX mb, I installed into a mid-tower ATX case. With stock cooler, the whole system is very nearly silent. I paid ~$200, which seemed like a very competitive price. Given the value for buck proposition represented by this processor at this price point when I purchased it was hard to find in stock anywhere. I suppose this is the Intel Empire striking back at the AMD Rebellion which has some very persuasive competitors in this price range. I have mixed feelings about what looks like Intel squeezing AMD profit margins, but my preference is for the undoubted superiority of the Intel processor in the uses to which I will put it, even if I will never get near the power ceiling of either camp's processor. Newegg, of course, was great. They were one of the few outlets that still had the processor in stock when I bought, and they delivered promptly. yeah Newegg!

Cons: This processor is not unlocked, so its potential in overclocking scenarios is limited which given its 65 Watt rating is kind of frustrating. What good is it to have an unlocked 140 Watt processor if overclocking it risks burning down the house? I am not going to overclock it, so this is not really a big negative to me. I would have liked to have installed an AIO water cooling system just for the fun of it and to be able to say I had it, but this processor certainly did not need it, and that made the system overall more affordable and practical for me. (I did not need a space heater for under my desk.) This processor has only two memory channels. You can use one or two matched pairs of RAM sticks. Read the mb manual to determine which pair of slots to use if -- like me -- you install only one pair: the right choice on my mb was neither intuitively obvious or color-coded. This is not really a con as long as you are looking at a mb with four RAM slots. No hyperthreading. But, six(!) cores, so who cares. On balance, I would think six actual processor cores is as good as a merely theoretical eight virtual cores running off physical four, more than 80% of the time; I cannot speak with authority -- just my uninformed technical intuition. (but, look for comparative benchmarking reviews on YouTube -- looks like I am mostly right; and read my argument for this processor below) You need an LGA 1151 300 series chipset motherboard for this processor, so this isn't a processor for popping in an ungrade in an older system. Effectively, this processor only makes sense in a new build. And, your choice of motherboards may seem a bit limited, since it is only a small subset of LGA 1151 socket mb's. I don't know, but I suspect the LGA 1151 (series 300) will be displaced in fairly short order -- probably the future belongs to 2066 pin or similar sockets. Oh well, . . . progress means obsolescence for our dreams! sigh. This processor supports 16 PCIe lanes, with 24 PCIe lanes thru the 300 chipset PCH. So, not the processor or chipset for yoking two high-end videocards together. But, most motherboards will support m.2 nVme SSDs, which I definitely would recommend making part of a new build.

Overall Review: In my heart, I wanted bragging rights with my new computer, but in the end, I chose not to pay for them. I suppose the child in me would have preferred an unlocked processor generating 140 watts on a 2066 socket, with water cooling, etc. None of that power would ever have mattered to my actual use. And, I did not really need the computer to be a supplemental furnace to heat my office. Back in the day, when I bought a new computer -- even if all I wanted to do was run Office -- I struggled to buy as much power as I possibly could. (Yes, children, there was a time when new computers might struggle with a large Excel spreadsheet!) But, my last new computer was a Core2Duo, so as slow as the advances in computing power have been over the last decade, this was going to be a step up, though the immediate motivation was to avoid total collapse in my aging system which was still mostly good enough. I wanted to make sure that I got over the threshold where I could play around with a VR headset if I took a mind to and where my Cities Skylines metropolis could continue to grow. With six cores (wow!) and the ability to run a single core at 4.0 GHz under demand and ALL six cores together at 3.8 GHz, this processor can bring a lot of power to bear. But, I cannot say I see a huge difference in routine daily performance over my aging Core2Duo. Webpages and spreadsheets are not a challenge for either computer. My new system's m.2 960 EVO SSD, compared to an 840 EVO in the old, has had more effect on the responsiveness of the system in daily use. In a raw processing power task, like compressing a zip file or processing some transformation in photoshop or running a physics benchmark, this processor will lag behind its big brothers, like an unlocked i5-8600K or an i7- 8700K and pretty much proportionately to its rated speed and number of available threads (those other processors have hyperthreading.) And, of course, the difference from the ol' Core2Duo is remarkable enough thought I am already forgetting the past. BUT -- and this is the big BUT that matters to the gamer on a budget -- in an actual game, with a high-end videocard (say a GTX 1080) in the system this processor will do the job more than adequately. Find a reviewer who has benchmarked actual games on a system with a high-end videocard, and you will see that this processor lags only slightly behind the theoretically more muscular processors in game performance. Of course, the videocard is doing the real work, but the point is that if the goal is game performance and this processor's price and the fact that it does not require an elaborate water cooler and an open window in winter to operate, makes it possible for you to afford a really good videocard, then this processor can be part of an effective budget allocation strategy to get to a first-class gaming system. Like i said earlier, one of my goals was to play around with VR. And, for that I need to be able to afford to ad a decent gamer videocard, which would be hard to justify if I have busted the budget on the base system. And, that was my reasoning.

Pros: My Lenovo IdeaPad 310 was an inexpensive laptop -- not a great performer, but I relied on it and when the screen was broken while travelling, I was distressed. It was a cheap computer, but not-so-cheap that I was OK just throwing it away. . I had replaced a screen once before, in another Lenovo -- different model -- a friend's computer that I had carelessly damaged. At that time, i had also purchased a little toolkit for laptop replacement, that includes a variety of screwdriver bits and little plastic chips for prying apart laptop cases. So, I sucked up by courage and ordered the part. . I thought the vendor seemed to be very concerned to make sure I got the right screen -- one that would match my model of computer. I appreciated that, since I shared the concern that I might buy the wrong thing. . I didn't buy the wrong thing. And, it was amazingly easy to replace the screen in the IdeaPad 310. Unlike my earlier experience, I did not have to dismantle the whole computer -- in fact, it was not necessary to touch the laptop base at all. The whole process was over in 20 minutes and that long only because I was slow. And, the laptop was functioning like nothing had happened. Also, the price was right. I still cannot get over how cheap a screen for an inexpensive laptop can be.

Cons: None really. (It is still not a particularly good laptop, of course.)

Overall Review: I would not hesitate to replace a screen in a Lenovo again. I do recommend finding a tookit, though. It really helped that I had the right screw bits and the little plastic widget for prying apart the plastic case of the laptop without damaging.

Pros: It was cheap

Cons: It doesn't work -- specifically, the Dell needs an identifying signal from the adapter, and this adapter doesn't send the necessary signal. So, no charge. I have a 65W adapter that the Dell will accept under protest -- it complains that things would be better with a 90W adapter, but at least the computer charges.

Overall Review: If it is too good to be true, it is probably false.