If you are
Yes, really
on a budget, the Lenovo IdeaPad 100 might be for you. Maybe.
perhaps
.Lenovo intends the IdeaPad 100 to rival Chromebooks, so they're selling these laptops with Windows for just $300. Not bad, Lenovo.
But - and this is a big one
but
- this price is only possible with a significant performance hit. Don't expect to do much on this laptop other than type documents and surf the web.
The design
The IdeaPad 100's design is as unassuming as it gets. It's just a black rectangle with a slight carbon fiber-like texture on the lid. It's the mid-range sedan among laptop designs, aka perfect average in every way. And that's not necessarily a bad thing - when you're buying a laptop this cheap, it's clearly better if it looks "like any other laptop" than having it
appearance
like a cheap laptop
.
The IdeaPad 100 model we're looking at is also a bit smaller than some of the competition at 14 inches with a glossy 1366 x 768 display. It's not a fantastic screen, but the viewing angles are quite a bit better than, say, the Acer Aspire E-15. And while color accuracy is (no surprise) poor, colors
to do
seem to pop a little more on the IdeaPad 100 compared to most rivals.
Build quality is pretty solid, apart from some flexing at the bottom of the screen. The IdeaPad 100 feels like a laptop you could throw in the bottom of a bag with some textbooks on it and not care. It's easy on ports, with just power, HDMI, ethernet, a unified headphone/mic jack, and two USB ports (one 3.0, one 2.0) on the left. There's a card reader on the front. Nothing at all on the right.
Rob Schultz
While the IdeaPad 100 is surprisingly cheap, it falls short of its class.
The keyboard is surprisingly good, with a decent click of the keys. You lose a number pad when you downsize to a 14-inch laptop, but... will you really miss it? In that sense, however, it's odd that Lenovo decided to remove the number pad but still add a column of home block keys (delete, home, end, page up, page down). It seems totally unnecessary.
The trackpad is finicky, to say the least. For some reason, as long as I place my finger flat on the surface before dragging, the trackpad doesn't seem to have a problem. However, when I try to use my fingertip (as I'm pointing at the trackpad ), only half of my swipes are registered. Considering how I typically use a trackpad, the IdeaPad 100 and I fight constantly. Your mileage may vary.
At least it has physical mouse buttons.
The sound quality is predictably terrible - almost all highs, and I managed to get it crackling and distorting by cranking the volume up to 100 percent on a YouTube video. I can honestly say I got better audio quality out of the speaker of my Nexus 5 phone, which doesn't say much.
Rob Schultz
The IdeaPad 100 is surprisingly cheap in price, but is outclassed by similarly sized competitors.
The specifications
Simply put, the IdeaPad 100 doesn't hold a candle to the competing laptops here in terms of performance. It's not the worst in its class, but it comes closer to the nuclear-powered Acer Aspire 10 than it does to the Acer Aspire E-15 with Core i5-5200U (from our Performance King not to mention the Toshiba C55-C).
But that doesn't really matter if you can find the IdeaPad 100 cheap. As a $300 laptop, the IdeaPad 100 isn't a bad choice. I wouldn't buy it for more, though.
Our IdeaPad 100 device was powered by an Intel Celeron N2940 clocked at 1.83 GHz with integrated Intel HD graphics, 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB 5400 rpm hard drive.
In PCMark 8, these specs translated into a home convention (ie web browsing, video chat, word processing, etc.) score of 1,339. That's a steep drop from the Toshiba C55-C's score of 2,527 - which in turn is a drop from the average Gaming laptop score of around 3,500.
Things are even worse when you need real performance, however. With a Creative Conventional score of 1,083 and a Work Conventional score of 1,631, the IdeaPad 100 just eclipses the Atom-based Acer Aspire 10's 801 and 1,382 scores. And it doesn't even come close to the 2,198 and 2,771 posted by the C55-C.
And if you're looking for a more realistic level of performance, just check out our Handbrake review. We feed the laptop a 30GB MKV file and see how long it takes Handbrake to transcode it. When the IdeaPad 100 were an incredible four hours and nine minutes (compared to two hours and twenty-nine minutes for the C55-C).
One final note: Lenovo has done something odd with the hard drive: in addition to the usual handful of partitions created by Windows 8.1, there's also a 25GB D: drive partition titled "LENOVO". I'm assuming that this makes OneKey recovery easier, but I felt it was worth pointing out that you lose another large chunk of disk space in the process.
The bloating
Considering that Lenovo was the main player in the recent SuperFish controversy, it is
definitely
It's worth taking a look at what third-party software is installed on this el-cheap laptop - and whether Lenovo has learned its lesson.
My first impression? Maybe. With the exception of my least favorite antivirus software, McAfee, almost everything that comes pre-installed on the IdeaPad 100 is either Lenovo or Lenovo-branded. This includes file transfer software SHAREit, OneKey Optimizer, Lenovo EasyCamera, Lenovo Experience Improvement, Lenovo Reach, Lenovo OneKey Recovery and more.
Overall, I would rather say Lenovo
wins
This category. While I would absolutely uninstall most of these Lenovo programs to free up disk space, at least all first-party native Lenovo programs are. They didn't even include apps like Netflix or Spotify in this thing! Awesome!
The judgment
The Lenovo IdeaPad 100 is a great bargain if you can get it at a bargain price. Like a
Yes, really
Price offer.Lenovo wanted to compete with Chromebooks with this laptop, and that's exactly the kind of performance you can expect. So make sure you get it for a Chromebook-like price. I'd say between 250-300€ and not more. Otherwise it's better to look for other options, either higher end (like the Toshiba C55-C) or lower (like the Lenovo S21e or Acer Aspire Switch 10 E).
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