By Brett Weinstein (NBR forum user Nrbelex)
The Lenovo IdeaPad U450p is a thin-and-light, 14” widescreen notebook introduced in August 2009 to the brand's preexisting line of U-series portable, consumer laptops. The U450 fills the gap between the 13” U350and 15.4” U550. The U-series notebooks are advertised as stylish, portable, multimedia machines with Consumer Ultra-Low Voltage (CULV) chipsets and thin LED screens. So has Lenovo managed to blend the perfect mix of performance and portability? Read on to find out!
Lenovo IdeaPad U450 Specifications: The configuration reviewed here is the 33892GU which features an Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 Processor (1.30GHz 800MHz 3MB) and dedicated ATI Radeon HD4330 512MB video card. Overall the laptop is well put together with every component fairly sturdy. The palm-rests and casing hardly flex and are well supported. The screen flexes and can be twisted slightly, but this is expected for a laptop of this thinness - a screen this thin simply can't be perfectly rigid. The fan is well positioned (for right-handed people) and has never gotten overly hot. The hard drive and DVD drive are considered “fixed” (non-removable) and upgrades and repairs will therefore be tough, requiring some navigation through the laptop's internal components. After working with Thinkpads and Dell laptops with easily removed hard drives and CD-drives (often in a swappable port), this was a bit of a bummer, but is pretty par for the course for consumer laptops. The underside provides access to one RAM SO-DIMM via two easily removed screws, a plastic-dummy-plugged SIM card slot via a simple lid, and three screws for access to the keyboard and internal components below it. The hinges could be a little more sturdy and the materials could be a little more high-end, but the actual build quality is high. The most striking elements of the design are the cross-hatched pattern throughout the entire case and the laptop's thinness. While somewhat wide at 14”, the front of the laptop is actually less than 1” off the desk. We've found 14” to be a great size for a laptop, and this is no exception; its dimensions combined with its very manageable wight make it perfect for travel and airplane tray tables, but equally usable daily on a desk. Screen and Speakers Left to right viewing angles are surprisingly good, but up to down viewing angles are typical to slightly weak. The “sweet spot” is large enough that it shouldn't cause problems. The screen can only fold backwards to about 125°– a bit of a surprise, but hardly a problem. If WXGA and glossy screens work for you, this laptop's screen doesn't fall short. The ATI Catalyst Control panel (included with the discreet graphics card) gives plenty of tweaking options. Combined with the video card, the screen is great for multimedia, light gaming and anything requiring a mid-level GPU. Two speakers are positioned to the left and right directly above the keyboard. Lenovo calls this a “Dolby Home Sound Room premium audio system with two stereo speakers,” but it would be more accurately characterized as slightly better than typical for a laptop. They get fairly loud, but the louder the volume, the tinnier the sound. Bass is lacking at best. The headphone jack or HDMI port are going to be essential for any serious music playing (more on this later). Volume up, down and mute buttons adorn the right side of the case beside the keyboard. To be honest, the speakers aren't terrible for a laptop, and probably a bit above average, but when external speakers are available, they will obviously be preferable. The Synaptics touchpad is typical with a fairly wide area for movement and two separate oversized, metalicized plastic buttons below. The material is smooth, slightly matte plastic and comfortable and easy to run a finger across. The speed is appropriate out of the box. The rightmost section of the touchpad has a line of barely tangible orange dots which indicate that a finger can be slid up or down to scroll. Multi-touch is supported. The touchpad is nothing special, but gets the job done. A microphone is located just to the left of it, so recording sound while using the touchpad or typing might cause some conflict. Input & Output Ports The back has no ports and holds the battery in place. The right side has the DVD burner, a wireless on/off switch, another USB port, a microphone jack and headphone jack. A 4-in-1 MultiMedia Card, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, Secure Digital (SD) card reader is in the front left. There is no fingerprint reader. This is a pretty good mix of ports in good locations. The headphone jack could cause problems for people who use a mouse immediately to the right of the laptop, but otherwise, nothing essential is missing or poorly placed. The laptop lacks expansion ports like an express-card or PC-card slot, but 3 USB ports basically excuse this. An S-video port, FireWire port and swappable bay would also be nice, but certainly aren't essential – especially in a laptop in this class. The 3.5mm headphone/audio jack gives a tiny bit of high pitched feedback at all volumes when plugged in to the wall. When unplugged the pitch drops and becomes slightly more noticeable. This isn't a major problem and is fairly typical for laptops, but it's worth noting for the audiophiles out there. An external sound card will be necessary for unadulterated sound. Performance and Benchmarks All benchmarks were run after removing the bloatware, on high performance energy management mode, and after a fresh restart. Catalyst Control center was set for performance and the default resolution was used. A virus scanner remained on in the background. The laptop takes 37 seconds to reach the Windows login screen and about a minute to reach a usable, wireless-connected main desktop. The U450p scored 3333 in the PCMark05 test suite – an average score for the class which was no doubt hurt by the CULV processor. The U450p scored a surprisingly good 3DMark06 score of 2592, making it one of the best graphics performers in the CULV class, exceeding the Dell Studio 14z by over 300 points. The ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4330 512MB makes light gaming possible and will give a boost to GPU accelerated programs (i.e. Photoshop CS4 and the upcoming Flash 10.1). This comes at the expense of some battery life. Nonetheless, the pairing of a dedicated video card with a CULV processor is slightly strange unless multimedia is going be a major focus for the user. Heat and Noise Wireless Battery Operating System and Software That said, the factory state included a surprising amount of bloatware. The computer came with a ton of trial-ware, adware and useless utilities. It took about 30 minutes to uninstall the useless programs, leaving only the required Lenovo utilities. Changing the default energy management performance profiles can make a difference in the overall speediness of the system. Changing the setting from the default of “Energy Star power saving” to “high performance” changes the screen brightness and CPU usage markedly. With a bit more time, we might download a clean copy of Windows 7, install it using the key on the bottom of the laptop, and install each driver and piece of software individually from the driver partition or the Lenovo website. This would almost certainly result in a slight performance boost. The breakdown of the partitions of the 320GB hard drive are a hidden 14.75GB OEM partition, a hidden 200MB partition, the 252.88GB C: and a 30.25GB D: for drivers. All are NTFS formatted. About 90% of C: is free upon arrival. Customer Support Conclusion Pros: Cons:
Build and Design
The Lenovo U450 is black with a plastic casing and gently rounded corners and edges. The lid and area surrounding the keyboard (including the palm-rests) have a tactile, checkerboard-like pattern which resists smudging, fingerprints and scratching. Some may find this pattern distracting or annoying after prolonged use, but we see it as a nice design choice which gives this the otherwise plasticky case a bit of class and differentiates it from the shiny plastic all too common recently. The screen lid has a metallic, plastic Lenovo emblem embedded in the upper left. The bezel around the screen is shiny, smooth, black plastic and the hinges connecting it to the body seem fairly typical – plastic on the exterior and not overly tight or loose. The laptop is held closed by the tension of the hinges. A fan is located on the left. The back has no ports and simply holds the battery in place. White indicator LEDs for A/C power, the battery, wireless status, Hard Drive usage and the touchpad (on/off ) are on the bottom left of the case. The power button is to the left of the keyboard and the Lenovo OneKey (for recovery, backups, etc.) is directly above it.
As a 14” widescreen, the area around the keyboard is fairly expansive, and Lenovo has struck a pretty good balance between useful buttons and clutter. If anything, the layout is a bit spartan with only the keyboard and five additional buttons. The power button (beside the keyboard on the upper left), Lenovo OneKey (just above the power button), volume up/down and mute buttons (beside the keyboard on the upper right) and speakers (above the keyboard) are intuitively placed.
The screen is a 14.0" WXGA (1366x768 - 16:9 aspect ratio), TFT LED backlight glossy. Lenovo measures it at 220 nits with a 500:1 contrast ratio. A 1.3-megapixel, fixed focus webcam sits above the screen in the bezel. The screen is free of dead pixels, fairly bright at its brightest setting, and can be turned off by hitting Fn+F2. Whites are slightly cooler and possibly more accurate compared to a couple older laptop screens – likely a characteristic of the relatively new LED backlighting. Colors are vibrant and text is sharp. The native resolution is pretty much ideal for a laptop of this size. A casual inspection in an unlit room reveals no light leakage or hotspots.
Keyboard and Touchpad
The keyboard on this laptop is slightly better than average. The spacing, size of the keys and the feel of the keyboard are all strong. Stroke distance and the feel of the movement are ideal and clearly influenced by the Thinkpad design. The sound of the keys is solid while slightly muted. There is some flex in the keyboard when serious pressure is applied, getting worse from left to right, but nothing noticeable under normal typing usage. Unique features of the keyboard include a shrunken, narrow Windows flag key between Ctrl and Alt on the left of the space bar, and an Fn key as the leftmost key next to Ctrl. The caps lock and num lock (F8) keys have white LEDs in them to show when activated. There is no number pad, but the orange Fn key gives access to a variety of additional buttons including volume and brightness controls on the arrow keys. Overall, it could have a little less flex, but generally it exceeds the quality of most consumer laptop keyboards.
On the left side are two USB ports next to each other (but decently spaced for wide USB dongles), a Gigabit ethernet port, an HDMI port (HDCP-compliant), a VGA port, the fan, the AC plug and a lock slot.
This configuration came with an Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 Processor (1.30GHz 800MHz 3MB) and 4GB PC3-8500 DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz (2x 2GB). The computer runs Windows 7 and typical programs – word processing, web browsing, photo management – with no problem. Being an ultra low voltage processor model, however, there are a couple trade-offs. While the battery life is extended beyond normal Core 2 Duo processors, the chip buckles slightly under load. There are rare hangups when going between major programs or performing CPU intensive processes. Configurations with lesser CPUs will probably struggle even more, and may have some performance issues with multiple demanding programs running. Video editing and serious gaming on this computer are not advised (though the GPU can definitely handle modern games at average to low settings), but given its size and target audience, this shouldn't be a problem, and everyday office tasks should not be at all challenging. Startup is decently fast and 4GB of RAM is more than enough for basically every installed program to run simultaneously yet smoothly. The 5400 RPM hard drive is typical and may be a good target for an upgrade to 7200 RPM or an SSD for those seeking the best possible performance.
The U450p calculated 32 million digits of π in two threads in an average of 63.975 seconds – slow in general, but average for a CULV.
This laptop doesn't get hot and never gets loud, even under load. The hard drive is nearly silent and the fan stays fairly quiet even at its fastest. One could easily sleep with this laptop nearby even at its loudest. The hottest spots are under the touchpad and at the vent. Neither gets more than warm to the touch. When operating, the CD drive is audibly noticeable, but no more so than most laptops. This is a very quiet laptop.
The Intel WiFi Link 5100 11a/b/g/n wireless card works better than many other wireless devices we've worked with, picking up dozens of local hotspots we usually don't see. Windows 7 cooperates with it perfectly, making wireless connections easier than ever. Bluetooth comes all set up, and pairing a device is intuitive. A Bluetooth mouse required simple pairing and no extra drivers. The computer may have an antennae for 3G connections, but the SIM card slot it would connect to is permanently sealed. This isn't a major loss, but again, a slight annoyance. Wireless works very well overall.
The battery is a 6-cell lithium-ion with 5200mAh, 57Wh. It slides into the back and has a lock and spring-loaded, plastic lever keeping it in place. Running the computer on Energy Star power management mode – the factory default – yielded 239 (3 hours, 59 minutes) minutes of power while browsing the web (with wireless and Bluetooth on), playing some videos and keeping a couple programs open. This is a decent time for a computer with a dedicated GPU, but weak for a CULV laptop. Stricter power settings, turning off the wireless transmitters and closing processes and programs would undoubtedly add more time, but with a low voltage processor, we were hoping for a good deal more.
The computer comes preinstalled with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit which runs very smoothly – Lenovo calls it an “Enhanced Experience” since they apparently made some adjustments and tweaks, though exactly what isn't immediately obvious. No recovery disks are included. The Lenovo OneKey Recovery console allows for the creation of recovery disks (requiring two DVDs or multiple CDs) and system backups to an image file. The computer has a hidden partition to enable recovery at the touch of a button to the factory state and a separate partition just for drivers.
The laptop comes standard with a 1-year parts and labor ➫warranty. This laptop was purchased with an additional one year Lenovo Onsite Repair Next Business Day policy. There's also 24x7 toll-free support for warranty issues during the warranty period at 877-453-6686. This service has not yet been tested, but Lenovo has a decent reputation for support and the on-site repair is generally considered good.
The Lenovo U450p is a thin, well built, fully featured CULV laptop ideal for consumers looking for a balance between performance and portability. At the price-point, the U450p is competitive with similar systems (i.e. the Dell Inspiron 14z and Dell Studio 14z), and probably has them beat on styling and thinness. Heavy users of the web, office software and multimedia will appreciate that they can roam with a machine able to handle basically anything thrown at it. The configurations with video cards are a bit of paradox, since adding a power-hungry GPU defeats the point of getting a CULV, but they do allow for more media handling. Serious gamers need not apply (though configurations with discreet graphics make many games a possibility). It lack some bells and whistles, is a little pricey, and has some minor annoyances, but they're reasonable trade-offs for one of the more powerful and stylish CULVs currently on the market.
