There are few laptops in the world that are fast and not to expensive. Imagine if you had one laptop that can break these rules. well that’s what one expert told me about the newest lenovo ideapad series, but just in case I performed a hands-on evaluation of the fifteen inch version of the ideapad s145. So It is the one of the lenovo jack-of-all-trades machines, besides improved design, processor, bigger ssdi drive, and the tiny price tag are the main points of this laptop. But are all these enough to keep the ideapad laptops competitive? Let’s find out.
If we look closer at the beautiful manila box, We can see Its box contains usual stuff, like a charger, laptop and a manual instructions. That’s great for people who doesn’t like too many things in the box. I can easily say that Lenovo s145 is a looker, but its build parts are pretty simple here. So on the outside it’s still built entirely out of plastic, but clean and smooth metallic texture lines still look cool. The screen lid has a brushed heavy metal finish to it and it has the new improved stealthy Lenovo logo in the corner.
So let’s open the lid… look at those bezels and be amazed by a spacious silver deck with the legendary ideapad keyboard. Its sits slightly indented into a pretend Cast iron surrounded with polish lines. The buttons and touchpad are quality built, fitting perfectly with the casi. When you press on it, you can feel plenty of travel, and you don’t need a satisfying force to register input.
The slightly roughened flat buttons aren’t stiff or loose. the keyboard itself is a little gloomy, because you only have caps lock and number pad button illuminated, so if you want a full backlight keyboard than check out idepad 340. The trackpad is spacious and works well for beginners , but if you need more precision, it is still best to connect a mouse.
As I’d expect of a laptop from ideapad series it has A lot more than a little of ports. The left side has an power, Ethernet, hdmi, audio and USB 3 type ports. You also have card reader and ken lock on the right side.I had no problem setting up vga web camera or Bluetooth, but if you wonder where the optical drive is, well ask the local museum, but if you are really serious, you can still get one in the higher 340 series .
The almost 16 inch screen is one of the sharpest, because it has full hd native resolution. So display does a great job of displaying web pages and documents, but looking at it from anything other than straight on renders the picture less attractive, especially in a darker room. The basic Ideapad has anti-glare display with 220 nits of maximum brightness and offers average tn screen colours. It will be good for everyday office and web use, but if you want 30% better colors, then go with ips screen version which also has a lot better viewing angles.
Lenovo outfitted the S145 with an improved cooling system designed to keep the laptop quieter and less hot when it is fully loaded. The SSD booted Windows 10 in an acrobatic 9 seconds, this a lot faster than the average laptops with 15 seconds. Benchmark-wise it does quite stack up to the other identically priced laptops in this class. For an affordable mainstream laptop designed for work and play, the intels processor and ssd disc drive in the idiapad S145 performed well and without noticeable fan noise. I can praise the good fan design so keyboard and touchpad were effectively cooled. With some tabs open in web browser (one of which was streaming You Tube video) and Office in the background, there wasn’t lag when scrolling and switching between apps.
I also tested some games – it ran smoothly and without any hiccups. Intel UHD Graphics offers good performance for simple games. However, if you want to play more advanced online games like fortnite, than it is the best to go with geforce or radeon graphics. The Ideapad s145 comes with a boring 2 cell battery. what that means is you’ll see little below average battery life when the laptop runs web apps. On the Battery Test, which involves continuously surfing the web over Wi-Fi, the battery lasted more than 3 hours, but it should last Up to 4 hours if you lower the screen brightness below 60%..
Lenovo insists on placing pair of speakers on the bottom of the notebook. The end result is muffled audio that barely fills a small room, but it should suffice for a small audience. You can expect a laptop in this price range to has pair of tiny speakers, but they are still loud enough for a small room, but you can’t expect much more than average muffled audio. in terms of low bass it is still best to connect to an external speaker. At least You can customize the sound to your liking with different audio profiles. so it will be still ok for streaming videos and listening to music on the move.
Lenovo has shown that it can embrace the thin bezels and sleek elegant chassis in the Ideapad S145. It provides solid multitasking performance for the price. making it a good value for office and home use, but not so great for work on the move, so make sure that you never forget to put the charger in the bag. However, we wish the touchpad offered more precision and a better ips screen, but it is still cheaper than some other similar laptops and it still manages to outperform them in the design department. All In all, the modifications Lenovo made to the Ideapad s145 make it the one of Decent laptops, However, if you want that backlit keyboard, wide angle screen, or optical drive, then check out the more comfortable ideapad 340.
