Thelosouvlakia
Classy-Fried-Chicken
1 Exterior
This is a fairly standard looking laptop, the outside shell is made of plastic
and has a matte finish on the wrist rest monitor bezel as well as the bottom
of the unit while the back side of the screen is textured and has the lenovo
logo on it. The textured surface is a fingerprint manget though, which is a
bit dissapointing.
The laptop stands on four rubber feet the front ones beeing shorter than
the back ones for that slight tilt for comfort.
The hinges on the monitor are actually really nice, quality made.
2 Hardware
CPU wise my model comes with an i5 5200U dual core hyperthredded pro-
cessor of Intel’s Broadwell lineup. Max clock speed of this processor is
2.2GHz however it can turbo up to 2.7GHz. However the processor will
run on a much slower speed of 800Mhz if you aren’t stressing it that much
in order to conserve power, as of right now with 2 firefox tabs open, one
beeing a Facebook tab and the other being the Word online tab and the cpu
frequency is fluctuatiing between 798Mhz to 1453Mhz.
When it comes to the gpu this laptop doesn’t come with a dedicated one
and all the work is done by the intergrated intel HD5500 graphics of the
i5 chip. I’m not going to lie, I’m amazed by the performance of this little
fellow. I’m running single channel memory still this little dude manages
decent FPS in some older or lighter games.
RAM wise the base model comes with a 4GB 1600MHz ram stick ddr3
so dimm- and there is one free slot for expansion. 4GB of RAM is adequate
for moderate use and light gaming so far I had no problems.
My model came with a 5200RPM 500GB HDD, while the first days of use
the whole system was quite snappy as I kept adding more stuff on the HDD
then the whole system slowed down a bit as expected, shouldn’t be much of
an issue though, you can save some money and buy a budget oriented SSD
performance will go through the roof.
It has 10/100 ethernet and b/g/n wifi, should be enough if you ask me
since this is a budget friendly laptop so Lenovo had to make sacrifices I deem
that gigabit lan and ac wifi were wise choices.
Oh, and for the traditional fellows out there it has an DVD drive! Now
some might have preferred that they had the option for a second HDD/SSD
instead of an optical disk drive, something I actually would like to see too.
2.1 Camera,Microphone
Laptops being communication devices must have a decent microphone and
a decent webcamera. While the microphone quality is ”good”, the camera
1
leaves a lot to be desired. A 360p camera? Really?! And photos and videos
look horrible, feels like a 5 Euro camera to be honest.
2.2 Keyboard, Touchpad
The keyboard is one of the best I’ve ever used on a laptop. It doesn’t have
fancy LEDs or macro keys other than the function keys every laptop has-
The build quality is solid, the keyboard doesn’t flex when I press the keys
hardly at all. It has a full numpad which is always a nice touch, the arrow
keys are full size and generally you won’t have any problems typing on this
keyboard it just takes a bit time to get used to the distance between the
keys.
The mousepad on the other hand can be described with one word ”meh”,
don’t get me wrong it does it’s job but the gestures never work as intended,
it keeps confusing zoom with scroll which is a bummer!
2.3 Thermals
I was actualy really surpised by the performance of the cooling solution of
this laptop, I expected it to be loud and the cpu throttling all over the place.
At idle or light loads the cpu doesn’t even run at 2Ghz so the fan doesnt
spin fast enough to even be audible. Currently I’m sitting outside in a hot
Greek Summer day cpu is sitting at 47C with foobar2000 and 5 firefox tabs
open and I can barely hear the fan.
I’ve also tried hammering the cpu with some OCCT, 30 minutes run with
the small data set at room temperature. The temperature didn’t exceed 85C
with the fan beeing loud enough but far from being terrible (by terrible I
mean the old stock AMD fan that came with the FX 8xxx processors)
Oh should also be noted that even at that max temperature of the cpu
had no impact typing on the keyboard, the keyboard was warm, not HOT.
2.4 Ports
On the left side of the laptop along with the air vent you’ll find the charching
port, one ethernet port, one HDMI connector 2 USB ports one beeing 3.0
and the other beeing 2.0 a headset (audio+mic) plug and on the right side
you’ll find a kensington lock and the optical drive not ports obviously-
2.5 Battery Life
When it comes to battery with this configuration and with windows set to
Balanced power plan you can get 3 hours of normal use with the screen
beeing at 80
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2.6 Audio
The build in audio solution is based on a conexant chip. A fairly good job has
been done regarding the headphone amp. I own a pair of Koss Porta Pros
that are 60Ohm headphones and a pair of DT990 PRO by Beyerdynamic
at 250Ohm. You shouldn’t really expect this laptop or any basic laptop
really- to drive the DT990 PROs efficiently it does a great job powering the
Porta Pros with the sound coming out clear and not getting distorted even
at higher volume.
The speakers on the other hand are bad, the sound comes out heavily
distorted they sound tinny. Also don’t expect having them above 80
2.7 Monitor
The panel it's an 15'' one fairly standard TN panel, the colours on this are 'good' with black beeing a bit dark gray and th others a bit washed out especially at higher brightness settings. The viewing angles are acceptable but nothing like the better tn gaming panels or IPS panels out there, overal happy with the quality though, no serious complaints
3 Useability
I’ve been using this laptop as my only PC for almost two weeks now and
all I’ve got to say I’m really pleased with it. It’s not made of space grade
aluminium that would make it light as a feather, it isn’t either a small laptop
of the range of 13” neither it’s an ultrabook regarding battery life, but for
the money this goes and my needs taking this with me to the university
library, writing and compiling code- is more than enough and I reckon it
will last me more than a couple of years.
Conclusion
The lenovo ideapad 100 is an excellent mid-low range laptop for whoever
might be interested in one. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to college
students like me who just want a computer to get their work done quickly
and efficiently and beeing able to bring with them whenever needed, this
laptop with the powerfull i5 will also do light gaming. Even modern titles
provided you turn down the graphics to low. Three years ago I would deter
people from buying a Lenovo laptop, so many build quality issues with
thermals beeing crazy fans beeing loud an the plastics being cheapo. As
of now Lenovo is back in the game, the build quality has been improved
dramatically. I paid 400 euros for this laptop while other laptops at the
same price came with Celeron Processors a 4th gen i3 at best and were
really cheaply made just putting the palm on the palm rest caused the
whole plastic to droop or were built like tanks but their internals would be
a quad core intel Celeron. Of course at this price range there’s no difference
in ram configurations most laptops come with 4GB of RAM some laptops
however don’t allow for upgrades- and a 500-1TB HDD (lenovo also offers
500GB SSHDs in some models) and of course no discrete gpu.
