Lenovo ThinkPad E495

5owners with an opinion

40%of verdicts positive

0/2positive/negative since 2024

2 yrslongest happy owner

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance; criticized for reliability and durability.

What people wrote

Doesn’t like itOwned 3 years

> A proper Thinkpad does not have issues with hibernation, or losing battery, or graphics, or any of the other things you mentioned. Not sure if my E495 would qualify as a "proper thinkpad", although I've read about the same issues on T series laptops, I've almost never managed to make my laptop sleep in the 3 years I've owned this laptop starting from kernel version 5.4.x to the present 5.19.x. Whenever I try to 'systemctl suspend', one of the following things happens - the laptop sleeps for a few seconds and wakes up - the laptop sleeps for a few seconds and wakes up completely frozen and I have to perform a hard reboot - the laptop doesn't sleep and freezes and I have to perform a hard reboot - the laptop sleeps successfully but when I wake it up, the screen is messed up with green colors all over the place, hard reboot needed My laptop also kept freezing randomly from 5.4.x to 5.14.x.

Doesn’t like itOwned 2 years

While still anecdotal, I'll give you two data points: The trackpad on my Thinkpad E495 is hanging and has lost the ability to register clicks, and had been like that after only two years of use. I think the reason is that the whole construction with lots of space is collecting dust. You can use the physical buttons above the pad, and some people like this retro design even, but IMO it's just reducing space and adds a border and height distance for your finger to travel, so arguably outdated and objectively worse. The Elan trackpad on my Thinkpad x13 gen 2 has been defective from the start and registers palm contact where there is none, with the effect that the touchpad stops responding like every 30s; this is a known defect.

NeutralOwned 2 years

Anecdata, but before going all-in on ThinkPads I though I share my experience. For the ThinkPad x13 2nd gen Ryzen I received for a customer project (with the customer not interested in getting it back after the project was completed) it's too early to say anything about reliability, but somehow the touchpad isn't centered properly and I always hit left click when I want right click - it's unbearable and surprisingly bad for a ThinkPad. Before, I had an ThinkPad E495 Ryzen that worked ok but after two years the touchpad got stuck - the pointless (for me!) construction with touch point and extra mechanical buttons (only acting as barrier) certainly didn't help. Before, I had my beloved Dell XPS 2016 which however had a swollen battery. Still, I consider it one of the best notebooks I had; gnome 2 and Unity also just got it right. In the last four years I got five (!) ThinkPad and Dell Precision notebooks for customer projects having battery or memory problems OOTB (the x13 I mentioned above was a notebook that finally worked). The notebook I used for the longest time (7 years) was a PowerBook G4 2003. I hope my current MacBook M1 will last me about as long, but at least 5 years. In terms of power management, display, and usability, a Mac notebook is in another league compared to Dells and ThinkPads with Linux, it's not even funny. Linux desktops have regressed to the point they have ceased to be usable for me. With the newer MacBooks, I think Apple listened to customers and na

Doesn’t like it

Yeah, I've always used ThinkPads and while IMO they're on average good devices, you better not buy the wrong series and/or iteration. The LX40 had an atrocious clickpad. The previous LX30 had serious WiFi issues, that I fixed by swapping the card, but it was overall the better device. Then there's issues with trackpoint drifting. On my oldest one the trackpoint simply died. On my e495 I'm getting weird driver issues, like Windows replacing the AMD graphics driver with a different one, so the Radeon control panel won't load and I can't control that useless VariBright feature. I can prevent Windows from doing this, but then one day the driver was just... gone and I've concluded that it's just better to let Windows do its thing. Also, crashes in Teams with too many windows open and while sharing, seemingly regardless of driver. Weird audio fuckups where the audio output craps itself randomly and starts crackling until reboot (fixed by installing an old Conexant driver and locking it down with group policy). Also, they make some questionable design choices, like swapping Fn and Ctrl, which you can at least undo in BIOS. My newest one (E16 Gen2 Intel) has FnLock enabled by default (wtf?). Gotta ask why they even removed the separate utility bar above function keys in the first place. And then there isn't even buttons for media control anymore... Also, don't get me started on Lenovo (Commercial) Vantage, which is an incredibly invasive and janky piece of software, but it does let

Likes it

I'm using a E495 with 1 TB HD on purpose. It's one if the fastest computers in my park, and I'm running Fedora. well it's the AMD variant, and I've tuned my performance profile and always keep the fans clean. His problem is certainly Windows 11 and the virus scanner, not the laptop. on some of my work laptops you cannot do any meaningful work because of windows. even the WSL is 10x slower on simple magit rebases. build times are 1-4 hours.

Likes it

Mine is probably pre-Alder Lake, so this certainly fits my experience. For my son, I got a Thinkpad E495 with a Ryzen 3700. It can go forever on a battery charge, but it lacks the spill-resistant keyboard as far as I can tell.

Likes it

ThinkPads, at least the mainstream models, certainly have always worked very well with Linux thanks to the great ThinkPad community who is really passionate about this. I've picked up a cheaper Ryzen E495 in retail a couple months ago because I needed a new notebook asap, and it works flawlessly with Ubuntu 19/20. Better first-party support (like Dell has had for many years now) had been promised for quite a while, so lets see if Lenovo keeps delivering; I'm all for having options. But tbh the Dell I had was hands down a better notebook experience (incomparably better display and trackpad, subjectively better keyboard even though keyboards are considered one of the strong points of ThinkPads). To match a Dell XPS, you have to go for a really premium Carbon X1 which is quite a bit more expensive. Downside with my Dell XPS was that the battery seems to have been broken OOTB and never lived up to Dell's projections, then began to swell so had to be replaced out of warranty.