I bought a Lenovo L530 in 2013, a little over a year after it was released, on the Lenovo Clearance Outlet website, for £435 including postage. It has a 15 inch HD screen and an Intel i3-3110M, the lowest spec Ivy Bridge core-i processor. Things I like: 1. It was the cheapest 15 inch Lenovo that: a) has both passive and active hard disk protection (passive including rubber cushioning; active including shock sensing and head parking) b) is certified to US Military Specs for toughness 2. The keyboard generally is reasonable to type on - far better than the great majority of current laptops, but not as good as a decent external keyoard. Its key tops are concave, making typing easier, faster and more accurate. (You have to pay a lot of money these days at most brands to get this once-standard feature on a laptop, even though you still find it on ATMs.) 3. It has a matte screen, which is less reflective than glossy screens. It is only 1366 by 768 and 220 NITS, but that is fine for me. (Higher resolutions are available.) 4. It has gigabit ethernet and decent wireless LAN. 5. I can upgrade to WWAN or add a SSD cache. 6. Build quality generally feels good. 7. It has USB 3 (USB 2 as well), VGA and mini-DisplayPort. 8. It has an 'advanced thermal design'. On the outside, this means extra vents, on the back as well as side. I sometimes work in hot countries so cooling matters to me. 9. I don't run out of memory any more! I used to use a 4Gb RAM laptop, which was insufficient as I work with quite a few programs up at a time. I upgraded my L530 to 8Gb and it is comfortable. It is great to be free to work how I like. It can take up to 16 Gb RAM, even though the documentation lists 8 Gb as its max. 10. I got it with Windows 7. It can run Windows 8; I simply prefer Windows 7. 11. The Lenovo software is actually helpful in configuring the system. E.g., you can configure how sensitive the trackpad is in detecting your palm resting / moving on it when you type. I find this very useful. On my previous laptop, sometimes while I was typing the cursor would move inadvertantly, text could be selected, and then deleted as I typed on, all because the trackpad is under my palm and I sometimes rest on it. This is not a problem on my L530. The L530's camera is fine for skype and its speakers are acceptable for my use, which does not include much entertainment. The processor is perfectly adequate: 2 cores; multithreading; HD 4000 graphics. I usually have a large external display and there is no problem with graphics capability (I don't play games). Haswell would doubtless be better but Lenovo still has not released Haswell Thinkpads. I would also have preferred a higher resolution screen (and 17 inch, 16:10 ratio). Bluetooth and a finger print reader would also have been nice (some models do have them). But for the price I am very happy with this laptop. No complaints at all.