Aldi Laptops

"Are Aldi Medion laptops any good?"

The Medion brand is manufactured by Lenovo for Aldi. There is no reason to think that just because Lenovo manufacture these products for Aldi that they are inferior in quality or performance. There may be differences in the specifications relating to the screen/display, the fact that there are "brighter" and more "vivid" offerings, but this is why the Medion brand is value for money.

A frequent search I see is "are Medion/Aldi laptops any good?". The maxim is you get what you pay for, and if you opt for an AMD powered Medion then you can't go wrong. This is unless you want to have a "top-of-the-line" visual performance. For general use the displays offered on the Medion is just fine.

My review

First of all, the laptop is a keeper. The configuration to what I wanted to do took just couple of hours and most of that was copying the html files from my old computer.

Yes, I swithed out of S-Mode pretty swiftly as I was not prepared to "fight" with Windows as it was telling me that I should be downloading and installing software from the Microsoft Store. One more wrinkle is that Windows asked me why I had switched out, this I ignored.

First Impressions

It is fast, well compared to my old computer. Also the battery seems to stay charged pretty well although it is too early to say yet. Normally I would leave my old laptop switched on as it took too long to start, the Medion I fully charged and switched off. In the morning the computer started almost immediately and the battery icon when clicked said that I had around 9hrs of usage left. This has now gone down to 7 something, pretty quickly, so I am takingthat as just an indication. The specifictions for the Medion don't really make any claims on battery life but it should be pretty good for a notebook purchased in 2021.

Battery Life

After a couple of days I can report on how the Medion notebook performs.

My usage of a laptop is different to what I perceive most users would be. The way I configure a laptop is to change what seems to be the default values of what the power button and closing the lid do. The defaults for these are switch the computer off and put the computer to sleep. I change this to sleep and do nothing. To turn the computer off I use the Start Menu. Closing the lid, which I do very often is mainly to prevent a cat walking across the keyboard and entering gobbldy goop in the file I am working on.

Unlike its predesesor the time to boot and the time to resume from sleep is about the same and is very quick, if not instantaneous. The main difference now is whether I want to return to were I left off (most of the time) or to start over (with all applications closed).

The reason that I normally want to return to where I was is that I setup my file transfers to only upload if the file is newer and Filezilla remembers this. Also the connection to the server is maintained along with all the files that I am working on.

I have read (see related links)that the way to unsure the optimal battery life is to try to keep your battery with about 80% charge. The theory here is that the stress level of the chemistry is not pushed to its limits. This seems to make sense to me and I will give it a go on this notebook. I can't really do this on my iPad as I use it to play music and Skype over a longer period of time and I can't charge it when the Display Port is connected. To be honest there is not a lot of difference between switching to sleep and doing nothing when the lid is closed. This is vastly different than my previous experience. Putting the notebook to sleep and then closing the lid has the same effect as have this done automatically as the notebook wakes-up when the lid is opened. I then have to enter the PIN to get back to where I was.

The amount of time left for a battery is very subjective in that it depends on so many things. If you are doing something that is processor or disk intensive then you will a much shorter time. This also applies to the screen brightness and other periferals that you have connected. All I can do is report what I see. The battery when fully charged, or within 95%, the time remanining is normally shown as 9-10 hours. However, if I let the battery deplete to the point where the notebook is telling me to charge the battery the notebook, when put to sleep, will not last until the nexr morning. Charging to over 90% and then putting the notebook to sleep will ensure that the notebook will be usable in the morning.

What other laptops I was looking at:

The MD63780 has a Ryzen 3 4300U 4 core processor but for £379.99 with similar specs to the laptop I was looking at it compares well.

• Asus Vivobook M4311A - 14" AMD Ryzen 5 4300U - 6 core £549,99 - Currys PCWorld.
• ASUS ZenBook 14 UM433IQ-A5037T - 14" AMD Ryzen 5 4300U - 6 core, 256 GB SSD, Grey - £649 Curry's PCWorld.
• DELL Inspiron 14 5405 - 14" AMD Ryzen 5 4300U - 6 core, 256 GB SSD, Silver - £549,99 - Currys PCWorld.

Aldi's Medion brand are actually manufactured by Lenovo. This seems quite fitting as I am replacing a Lenovo Yoga 2-in-1 laptop that has a cracked screen. My old Lenovo Yoga 400 has an Intel 3825U processor and 4G of memory, the MD63780 has the AMD Ryen 3 4300U (4 core) and 8G of memory. The Medion should be faster.

Looking at the performance specs for the AMD Ryzen 3 4300U and the AMD Ryzen 5 4300U there doesn't seem to be that much difference between the two despite that the Ryzen 3 is a quad-core and the Ryzen 5 is a hex-core. The fact that they both have the designation 4300U is a puzzle to me.

I was staying away from Intel processors as I believe that you can get a Ryzen 5 laptop for the price of an Intel i3 equiped model. The performance of the Ryzen 5 4300U is getting close or surpasses some Intel i7 chips. I would say that there is at least a £150 premium for an Intel powered laptop.

Windows 10 in S Mode

The first thing that I was going to do was to switch from S-Mode to Windows 10 Home. My intention is to run Notepad++ and Filezilla.

I want to use the MD63780 to maintain tempusfugit.me.uk and other websites. The Microsoft Store shows that it has both of the applications as apps that can be installed in S-Mode. I also see that there is a free version of VLC, Media Player, as I will want to view 4k videos.

The switch to Home is one-way but if if it doesn't work then the laptop will be returned to Aldi. It will then be their problem to return it to S-Mode.

Screen Resolution and Zoom

One of the things that I have noted, and it is not a critisism, is that there seems to be some difference from what I was seeing on my old computer.

The native resolution of the display is higher than what I was using on my old computer. The result of this is the menus, tabs and icons are smaller on the screen making them more difficult to read. The text that I am editing can be zoomed in the normal way.

USB ports and drivers

The fact that the notebook has both USB type A and type C creates a problem relating to drivers with respect to Apple devices connected to the notebook.

The specs and the manual don't really make it clear whether the USB type A is 2.0 or 3.0, due to the fact that it is not blue, I think that an assumpsion that it is only 2.0.

German Keyboard

Puzzled by visits to this page with the search "Aldi Laptop Review" it appears that the 13.3 inch Aldi Laptop, on sale December 2021, may have been shipped wth a German keyboard. The X and Y keys are swapped and there is a QWERTZ keyboard.

SEO Notes

I have recorded a query that appears to have found my page on Aldi Reviews (for the Medion MD63780 notebook).

Some of the searches are asking "are Medion laptops any good?"