Happy Holidays to all. It has been a bit quiet around our house this year (empty nested) and I have still not had time for some of my intended projects yet. I did receive the Cyber Monday laptop I decided to add to my household collection. It is delightful testimony to the industry coming around to my point of view on what a personal computer should be and should be capable of.
With time, I have had some exposure to the 1909 build of Windows 10 which actually has been behaving itself for me. It can be difficult getting to that version with some of the intermediate versions making a real mess of some machines so I would look for a cumulative upgrade to 1909 if you are still running an 1803 or 1806 build of Windows 10 and see if you can avoid the intermediate steps. At all times, but particularly with the summer upgrades of Windows 10, please make good backups before granting permission for it to load new versions.
This particular laptop is 15″ with a decent keyboard and keypad, 8gb RAM, 256gb m.2 SSD, an assortment of ports including USB-c and HDMI and Lenovo went with an AMD Ryzen 5 for this laptop which is a favorite of mine for home computers and office computers alike. Battery life is a tad less than I had hoped for at only 4 – 4.5 hours on a full charge, but that is adequate for most applications. I see that Lenovo is discontinuing this product line the Ideapad 330s and replacing it with the 340 series so it may reappear at wonderful prices for a bit yet. $300-$400 depending on the exact configuration seems reasonable to me.