Last Updated on December 5, 2022
Summary
The T470 was regarded in its day as a mainstream business laptop with a superb keyboard, sleek design, reasonable weight, and long battery life.
Buying a refurbished laptop can be a minefield. One of the obvious areas of concern is the condition of a laptop’s battery. The advantage of the T470 is that this risk is somewhat reduced given that it has two batteries, one of which can be replaced without opening the laptop. That might be a very important consideration.
Given the huge number of charge-cycles reported by upower, we were pleasantly surprised with the battery length of our T470. Around 4.5 hours with light usage was better than we expected. And there’s a wide range of replacement batteries available including 6-cell 48Wh and 9-cell 72Wh. With light usage, the laptop uses around 5 or 6 Wh. A 9-cell battery together with the remaining juice in the internal battery should give around 15 hours of battery life. That’s perfect.
To be frank, we are somewhat disappointed with the condition of our display. It does suffer too much from light diffusion for our liking but this can be mitigated by using a dark theme.
On balance, the laptop is very good value. While it’s only a dual core processor, there’s sufficient processor power for many uses cases. Bear in mind that a new laptop at a price point of around £100 will offer something like a tortoise-slow Celeron N4200 with eMMC and less RAM. The refurb T470 is head and shoulders superior in every respect to that type of laptop or a Chromebook.
Maybe we were unlucky with the display? If you’ve bought a refurb Lenovo T470, share the condition of your display (and battery life) in the Comments section below.
We consider the refurb is definitely worth the money by a long chalk. And there’s a 1 year warranty to boot.
We’ll delve more into the specifications of the laptop in the next article in this series.
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – Condition of Refurbished Laptop
Page 3 – Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| Lenovo ThinkPad T470 Ultrabook | |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | We spotlight the condition of our refurbished T470 laptop |
| Part 2 | Specifications of the T470 laptop using the inxi utility to interrogate the system |
| Part 3 | Installing the Manjaro distribution |
| Part 4 | We run a series of benchmarks on the T470 and compare to other machines |
| Part 5 | Multimedia performance including power management |