Simple pleasures
LAPTOP | £470 from Lenovo www.snipca.com/49046
It’s been a while since we’ve reviewed a Windows laptop with a price as low as this. For less than £500 you get a 15.6in screen, an Intel Core i3-1315U processor and 8GB of RAM. It certainly has enough in the tank to run Windows at a reasonable rate of knots, but there are – not surprisingly – compromises.
The build is good quality, as you’d expect from a brand such as Lenovo, but it’s nothing that stands out from the crowd – the lid is aluminium while the base is plastic.
The screen is relatively lacklustre, offering a maximum brightness level of 250cd/m2. This makes it fine for indoors, but you won’t want to use it outside on a sunny day. Colour-wise it manages a measly 60.5 per cent of the sRGB colour standard. That’s too low for serious photo editors, but won’t matter if you’re spending most of your time just handling emails or browsing the web.
If you use our link above to buy this PC, you’ll see that you can tweak its specification. If you’re planning to work on the IdeaPad Slim outside you could upgrade the screen to a 300cd/m2 panel for an extra £10. It’s not a huge increase and it won’t do much to improve colour accuracy, but it might be worth it if you need the extra brightness.
Our review unit also came with a 256GB SSD, which is acceptable, but a little on the small side if you’re planning to install plenty of programs. If that’s the case, you should consider the 512GB option for an extra £50.
The 6-core i3-1315U processor sits at the more basic end of Intel’s 13th-generation processors, but with 8GB of RAM to help it out, it’s fine for running general Windows tasks, checking email, streaming movies and browsing the web.
We tested it with 20 Chrome tabs open running a variety of websites and tools, and it managed absolutely fine. Gaming performance was disappointing, however, with even a fairly undemanding game such as Civilisation VI running at a disappointing 17 frames per second.
