The Lenovo G450 is a 14-inch screen laptop designed for buyers that are on a budget but still want a laptop that is of decent quality and portable enough to take places outside of the home or office.  The Lenovo G450 could be a good laptop for students as they certainly have to be cost conscious and portability is necessary to be able to easily carry a laptop in your backpack.  I recently found the G450 for a great price so decided to pick it up and try it out for some of the school work I do.

Configuration and Performance

The Lenovo IdeaPad G450 model I purchased came with the following configuration:

• Processor: Intel T4300 2.10GHz processor, 800MHz system bus, 1MB l2 cache
• Screen: 14-inch, 16:9 format LED backlit (1366 x 768 resolution)
• Memory: 3GB DDR3 SDRAM
• Hard Drive: 250GB (5400RPM)
• Graphics: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X4500
• OS: Windows 7 Home Premium
• Wireless: Broadcom 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi
• Optical Drive: DVD Recordable (dual layer)
• Webcam: 0.3-Megapixel
• Ports: ExpressCard/34 slot, Three USB 2.0 ports, monitor-out port, Ethernet port, headphone out and microphone in
• Weight: 4.9lbs

The Intel Pentium T4300 dual core processor that comes with the IdeaPad G450 clocks in at 2.10GHz, although it’s not branded as a more fancy Core 2 Duo processor, the Pentium T4300 actually performs well and if you look at a chart from the benchmarking site CPUBenchmark.net you’ll see it actually performs ahead of some older Core 2 Duo processors:

So you have no need to worry about the G450 being underpowered if you get the Pentium T4300 processor.  In fact, I recommend this processor because it is a lot cheaper than the G450 with the Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 2.40GHz processor.

The Lenovo G450 configuration I have comes with 3GB of RAM, which is ample to run Windows 7.  The hard drive storage is 250GB and the spin speed is 5400RPM, which is a standard rotation speed for a budget laptop hard drive.  The graphics are taken care of by an Intel integrated X4500, this won’t allow you to do any high-end gaming but for most people running productivity applications on their laptop (email, web, Microsoft Word) this will be more than enough.

Overall I found the performance of the Lenovo G450 to be really quite good, especially for a budget laptop that has a low price of around $500.  There is never any slow down when using the computer, though the most I demanding thing I did was watching HD video on sites like YouTube and Hulu.com, the processor had no problems keeping up with the demanding flash decoding that has to be done for HD video.

For those interested in benchmark results, here’s a comparison to the Dell Inspiron 14 and Dell Studio 14z competing 14-inch laptops and then the benchmark results screenshots for the Lenovo G450 are pasted below that:

PCMark Vantage	PC Wizard Benchmark results
3DMark06	Windows Experience Index

Lenovo G450 Design and Build Quality

The Lenovo G450 doesn’t exactly provide an eye catching design, it’s a little bland to be honest.  The lid is gray in color and has what Lenovo calls a “hairline finish”.  Basically it looks like a brush metal finish but quite obviously the lid is made of plastic and not metal.  The lid is also glossy and as you will see in the picture below this means that it reflects a fair amount of light and will pick up fingerprints:

Inside the laptop the finish is the same as the lid, a gray hairline finish but with a black screen:

The keyboard is black.  One nice design finish is that the white indicator lights have a pleasing look.  At the top of the keyboard the volume control buttons are touch sensitive and when you press them the buttons glow to indicate they have registered a touch:

The indicator lights below the touchpad indicate from left to right in the above picture that power is on, battery is charging, wireless is on and then finally hard drive activity.

The build quality of the Lenovo G450 is surprisingly good, though the case is made entirely of plastic it is quite rigid and you won’t find much flex to the body.  There is some flex in the palm rests, but not enough to notice while you type.  The weakest point of the laptop seems to be on the bottom underneath the optical drive, I can push in quite a bit there, due to the fact the optical drive is mostly hollow space this is not an unusual thing.  Overall I would give the build quality of the Lenovo G450 a B-, it’s not the best but it is a bit better than I would expect for a budget laptop that cost me under $500.

Lenovo G450 Screen

The screen for the G450 is nice and bright, Lenovo rates it at 220-nits, which is good.  The display has a glossy finish, meaning the colors are bright and vibrant, but you do get some reflection from the display because of the glossy overlay.  For an example of the reflection you get on the screen from bright windows/lights in the room check out the image below:

The display is very wide, having a 16:9 ratio and 1366 x 768 resolution, this is good for watching movies in widescreen format but it’s a pain if you have very tall web pages as it involves a lot of scrolling.  You can fit a lot of stuff on the screen horizontally, but not vertically.  I can’t complain too much about this though, most every notebook made these days has this same 16:9 widescreen format, there’s no getting away from it.

The screen actually has pretty good viewing angles for a laptop, so overall I’d say this screen is slightly above average and most people will think it’s just great.

Lenovo G450 Port Selection

The port selection on the Lenovo G450 is fairly limited, it comes with 3 USB ports, an ExpressCard 34mm expansion slot, one monitor out port, an Ethernet port, headphone and microphone port.  I miss having a media card reader built-in, as that makes it easy to transfer images from a camera via SD card, but you could buy an accessory to put in the ExpressCard that acts as a media card reader.  The G450 probably has enough ports for most people, but I know some people won’t buy a computer without an HDMI port for high-definition video output, but you can’t expect that in a budget laptop.  Below are pictures of each side of the laptop and a description of the ports you will find there:

Front side: headphone and microphone port

Left side: Ethernet, Monitor out, two USB ports and an ExpressCard 34mm expansion slot

Right side: USB port, optical drive, power jack

Back side: Just the battery

Lenovo G450 Battery Life

The advertised battery life for the Lenovo G450 is 5 hours.  You could probably get that amount of battery life setting screen to the lowest setting and turning off wireless, but that’s not how most people use a laptop.  For a realistic test I  charged the battery to 100%, then pulled the plug and put the screen brightness at half and left a web page open that refreshed every two minutes.  Doing this, the computer shut down with 5% battery life remaining after 3 hours and 55 minutes.  You can assume you can get about 4 hours of battery life using the G450 under normal conditions, if you’re doing a lot of tasks it might be closer to 3.5 hours.

Lenovo G450 Keyboard and Touchpad

The keyboard for the Lenovo G450 is comfortable for typing, the keys are actually very “desktop like’, they’re chunky and are protrude up more than an average laptop keyboard with flatter keys.  The keys also have a matte finish, they’re not glossy and slippery like some consumer notebooks.  The keyboard is solid with no flex, there’s nothing worse than a mushy springy keyboard.

There are some useful buttons above the keyboard worth mentioning.  The touch sensitive volume up, down and mute buttons on the top right are nice and responsive.  In addition, the power button on the top left side has a backup system button next to it that makes it very simple to launch an application that allows you to backup or restore the G450 to a previous state.

I’m not a huge fan of the touchpad, it uses a glossy surface that I find is hard to glide my finger across and it just doesn’t feel very responsive, there is sometimes lag.  Using the scrolling areas of the touchpad also proved challenging, sometimes working and sometimes not.  I’d recommend plugging in a wireless mouse if you’re at a desk or table, otherwise you’ll just have to get used to using the touchpad and it’s quirks.

Lenovo G450 Speakers

The speakers for the G450 aren’t much to write home about, they’re loud enough but tinny sounding like many budget laptop speakers end up being.  They’re actually positioned on the screen, right at the bottom where the hinge area is.  I don’t know how Lenovo crammed them in there, but needless to say since there isn’t much space there’s no way you’re getting any bass from these speakers.  The speakers are fine fine for system sounds and spoken audio, but I recommend using headphones for any music.

Lenovo G450 Web Cam

Worth mentioning is the fact that G450 comes with a 0.3 megapixel web camera.  While that is low resolution, it worked pretty well in low light situations and Lenovo provided some nice software for using the web cam so that’s easy to do.  Also included is facial recognition software so you can setup Windows to log you in when it recognizes your face instead of having to type a password, pretty cool!

Conclusion

Overall the Lenovo G450 is a good laptop for the price.  When spending a limited amount on a laptop you know there will be certain sacrifices such as not having all the ports you might like and a design that isn’t exactly stunning.  I like the fact the G450 has a solid feel to it and seems it will last some of the bumps and bruises that come with getting carried around in a backpack.  The performance from the Intel T4300 processor and 3GB of RAM was just fine for my needs, the system never experienced slowness when using productivity applications or even during multimedia use.  I recommend the G450 to those on a budget, if you can spend $200 more you can find more appealing laptops, but for the price of the G450 you can’t go wrong.