Lenovo G50-45 Laptop Review

Lenovo G50-45 Laptop Review
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The G50's mediocre keyboard is typical for laptops in this price range. Keystrokes offer a reasonable amount of feedback, but it's the shallow design of the keyboard that really hurts the typing experience, with just about 1.3 mm of travel. That makes typing on the G50 feel stiff compared to the experience on the X555LA (1.55 mm) and Inspiron 15 5000 (1.5 mm). Those notebooks are more comfortable for extended typing sessions, but the G50 is fine for hammering out the occasional email replay.
Like other 15-inch notebooks, this one comes with a full 10-key number pad to the right of the standard QWERTY layout, which is a perk if number crunching is part of your job. And I like the full-size arrow keys, which make with batetry such as Lenovo FRU 92P1182 Battery, Lenovo 3000 C100 Battery, Lenovo 40Y8313 Battery, Lenovo 121000929 Battery, Lenovo 57Y6632 Battery, Lenovo L09S3Z14 Battery, Lenovo IdeaPad S100 Battery, Lenovo IdeaPad U165 Battery, Lenovo IdeaPad U150 Battery, Lenovo 57Y6460 Battery, Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E10 Battery, Lenovo ThinkPad X100e Batteryit easy to navigate around documents.
I'm also a fan of the matte plastic finish on the G50's touchpad, which my finger glides over easily. Mouse control was responsive, and so were gestures like two-finger scrolling. The pad itself doesn't click down; instead, the G50 has traditional left and right mouse buttons.
The G50 features a DVD drive on its right edge, which will come in handy if you need to install a piece of legacy software via a disc. Otherwise, you get a standard array of ports, including two USB 2.0 ports and one USB 3.0 port, HDMI and VGA ports for connecting to monitors and projectors, a 2-in-1 SD/MMC card reader, and a Kensington lock slot for physically securing the notebook at your desk.
The G50 is powered by a 2-GHz AMD quad-core processor with 6GB of RAM. The internal hard drive offers 320GB of storage, which can be expanded via the SD card slot.
Compared to other budget laptops, I saw middle-of-the-road performance from the G50 during my testing period. Everyday business tasks like managing my email inbox and editing documents were smooth, though I occasionally saw a bit of slowdown during moderate multitasking.
That experience was reflected in the Geekbench 3 benchmark test, which measures overall performance. The G50 racked up a score of 3,756, which is solid for the price and beats the category average of 3,552. Some rival notebooks scored better, though, including the Inspiron 15 5000 (4,432) and the X555LA (4,220).
The G50 performed similarly in our multitasking test, which challenged the notebook to open a 69MB Word document while playing HD video in the background. Lenovo's laptop completed the task in roughly 41 seconds, which beats the category average of 52 seconds. The X555LA finished in a speedier 35 seconds, though.
It's tough to appreciate the G50's portability with a meager battery life like this. The laptop died after just 4 hours and 22 minutes in our battery test, which simulates continuous Web browsing over Wi-Fi. That's shorter than the category average (5:10) by nearly an hour. It's especially poor compared to competing notebooks like the Asus X555LA (5:55) and the long-lasting Acer Aspire E5 (8:10). In other words, don't expect the G50 to last through the end of the workday, or even through a long business flight.
Our G50 review unit shipped with Windows 8.1, but you can update to Windows 10 just by running the standard Windows Update utility. Windows 10 — the latest version of Microsoft's desktop operating system — offers a bunch of nice productivity-boosting features for business users.
Those features include a new virtual-assistant app called Cortana, which can perform all sorts of tasks, from quickly creating new calendar appointments to quickly locating files on your hard drive. You also get the ability to create virtual desktops to keep your work sessions organized, as well as the Action Center, a sidebar that groups alerts, notifications and messages in one spot. Check out our full review of Windows 10 to learn more.
A handful of productivity apps also come preloaded, including Evernote for taking and saving notes, and OneDrive for backing your files up to the cloud. A free one-month trial of Microsoft Office 365 is also included, though you'll have to pay for the apps if you want to keep using Word, Excel and PowerPoint after the trial period.