Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch review: A daily driver with all-day battery life

Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch $700.00 This is one of the most affordable Ultrabooks we’ve seen, and the compromises Lenovo made to get there are not showstoppers by any stretch.

If you think an Ultrabook is out of your price range, you haven’t seen Lenovo’s IdeaPad U430 Touch. Ostensibly designed for the consumer market, the U430 carries over many of the features that render Lenovo’s corporate laptops so appealing, including a rigid but elegant all-aluminum enclosure and an exceptionally good, island-style, backlit keyboard.

The dual-core Intel Core i5-4200U processor inside the IdeaPad U430 Touch is one of the least powerful members of the Haswell Core i5 family, but that didn’t stop this computer from delivering a Notebook WorldBench 8.1 score of 199. That marks it as nearly twice as fast as our reference notebook, an Asus VivoBook S550CA powered by a third-generation Intel Core i5-3317u. Lenovo outfits the U430 with a typical 4GB of DDR3/1600 memory.

Lenovo’s IdeaPad U430 Touch is nearly twice as powerful as our reference notebook.

Lenovo clearly had to hold back on some features to hit the $700 price, and the 14-inch display is one of them. The touchscreen panel is plenty bright, and it delivers very good image quality, but its resolution is limited to 1600 by 900 pixels. Still, that’s better than the 1366-by-768-pixel resolution that many of its competitors offer. Another drawback is that this computer relies on the GPU integrated into its Core i5 CPU, so you can’t expect to do much hard-core gaming: Among the five laptops in our testing group, the U430 posted the slowest performance on BioShock Infinite, even with the resolution reduced to 1024 by 768 pixels and the visual quality set to low.

Intel's integrated graphics processors are much better than the GPUs in its third-generation Core processors, but you'll still need more power than that if you want to play games.

The U430 is equipped with a 500GB mechanical hard drive that spins its platters at a leisurely 5400 rpm. A solid-state drive—or at least an SSD cache—would have produced much better performance, but Lenovo would have had a hard time reaching such a low price with either of those features. You’ll find two USB 2.0 ports on the right side of the computer, along with an SD Card reader and the power connector.

Battery life of 6 hours, 38 minutes is an impressive stat.

Lenovo placed the sole USB 3.0 port on the left side, along with a headset jack, an HDMI output, and a wired gigabit ethernet port. Wireless networking and Bluetooth come courtesy of Intel’s dual-band Wireless-N 7260 chipset (which also supports Intel’s WiDi wireless video-streaming technology). Stereo speakers on the bottom of the chassis deliver surprisingly clear highs, but they’re almost devoid of bass response.

The Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch is on the heavy side for an Ultrabook, weighing in at 4.2 pounds, but it’s well made and very attractive, and its battery lasted for a full 6 hours, 38 minutes in our tests. It’s a terrific value at $700.

Note: This review is part of a roundup of the 5 best Haswell notebooks as of September 2013.

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Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch review: A 15.6-inch budget laptop that's strong on performance and can survive some rugged handling

This solidly built notebook features a great touchscreen display, an even better keyboard, and a huge and fast hard drive. But Lenovo’s networking component choices are a bit disappointing.

Lenovo laptops are the models of choice for many corporate IT departments, and the company manufactures some very good consumer-oriented machines, too. The IdeaPad Z400 Touch is a case in point. You wouldn’t mistake it for a sleek Ultrabook—it’s thick and heavy, and its battery life is wretched—but the Z400 did finish second on Notebook WorldBench 8.1 in our five-laptop competition. And despite Lenovo’s copious use of plastic, the Z400 is built like a brick outhouse.

LenovoLenovo's IdeaPad Z400 Touch is a strong contender.

Lenovo stuck with Intel’s third-generation Core processor for this budget-priced machine, pairing a 1.6GHz Core i5-3230M with 6GB of DDR/1600 memory. At 14.0 inches, its 1366-by-768-pixel display is much smaller than the Acer Aspire E1-572-6870’s 15.6-inch display; but the IdeaPad Z400 boasts a ten-point touchscreen, whereas the Acer does not.

The Z400 is an attractive PC, with charcoal-colored soft-touch paint on the outside and a pretty carbon-fiber look on the inside. Lenovo’s computer feels as rugged as Acer’s feels fragile. Though the display exhibits a little flex, the lower chassis is as rigid as some all-metal bodies I’ve tried to bend. The downside to the solid construction is weight gain: Despite its smaller display, the Z400 outweighs the Acer by 0.7 pound. Still, it comes by most of that weight honestly. Lenovo provides 6GB of memory (as against Acer’s 4GB); packs a 1TB, 7200-rpm hard drive (versus the Aspire’s 500GB drive); and includes a DVD burner (Acer provides no optical drive at all).

The tests in this suite evaluate how well a system handles editing digital media files and encoding them to different formats.

The IdeaPad Z400 comes with the type of top-notch keyboard that Lenovo is famous for building. The island-style keyboard is fully backlit and feels great under the fingers. It lacks a dedicated numeric keypad, and there’s no provision for temporarily assigning letter keys on the right side an alternative function to serve as one, but I was happy to see the full-size arrow keys in the familiar inverted-T formation at the far edge.

Augmenting the touchscreen is a responsive trackpad that supports most Windows 8 gestures, including two-finger scrolling, swipe, zoom, and rotate. The trackpad doesn’t have distinct right and left mouse buttons, but clicking in the lower right and left areas of the pad perform the same function. Unlike Lenovo’s higher-end notebooks, the Z400 does not embed a trackpoint in its keyboard; however, I found that the trackpad and the touchscreen were all I really needed.

Benchmark performance

The IdeaPad Z400 took a solid second place in our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 benchmark competition (behind the Acer Aspire E1-572-6870), with a score of 132, marking it as 1.3 times faster than our reference Asus VivoBook S550CA, which comes outfitted with a 24GB SSD cache for its hard drive.

None of these inexpensive laptops delivered especially good performance on high-level games such as BioShock Infinite.

The Lenovo placed third in the PCMark 7 Productivity, despite having a 7200-rpm hard drive (both the Acer Aspire E1-572-6870 and the Toshiba Satellite L55Dt-A5253 were much faster). But the IdeaPad captured first place on our media editing and encoding tests. It finished in the middle of the pack on our gaming tests, delivering a leisurely frame rate on BioShock Infinite of 18.4 frames per second, even with resolution set to just 1024 by 768 and visual quality set to Low.

Our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 suite includes a broad array of benchmarks for evaluating a notebook's performance.

Connectivity and conclusion

The IdeaPad Z400’s networking capabilities are a bit disappointing. Though Lenovo selected a high-quality Wi-Fi adapter—Intel’s Centrino Wireless-N 2230—it’s a single-band adapter that doesn’t give you any choice but to connect to crowded 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networks. On the bright side, it’s a 2x2 adapter, meaning that it supports a maximum physical link rate of 300 mbps. It also provides Bluetooth 4.0 support, and is compatible with Intel’s WiDi video-streaming technology. The wired ethernet adapter, meanwhile, is limited to 100 mbps—I thought those adapters had gone the way of the PS/2 port.

LenovoAll of the touchscreen notebooks had highly reflective displays.

In addition to WiDi, you have your choice of HDMI or VGA video outputs for connecting to external displays. And like the Acer Aspire, the IdeaPad has three USB ports, but only one of them is the speedy USB 3.0. Lenovo does provide a memory card reader that supports both SD and MMC media, and the company includes Dolby Home Theater technology and a set of decent speakers, so you won’t have to rely on headphones for an enjoyable audio experience.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch is a heavy computer for its size, its network connectivity is weak, and its battery life is very poor. But this laptop is a very good performer, with a great keyboard, an optical drive, and the largest, fastest hard drive in this group. It’s also the machine I’d recommend if you need a computer in this price range that’s rugged enough to tolerate a little rough handling. Overall it finishes a solid second in our roundup.

Editor's note: This notebook was reviewed as part of a roundup for back-to-school season. You can read that story, along with reviews of the five notebooks we compared it to, here.

Michael manages PCWorld's hardware product reviews and contributes to TechHive's coverage of home-control systems and sound bars.
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Review: Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga 11S strikes a compelling pose

Few Windows hybrids highlighted the compromises inherent in straddling device genres as thoroughly as the original Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11. Physically designed as a “notebook first” hybrid, yet sporting a tablet-oriented ARM processor and the neutered Windows RT operating system, it was nothing short of an elegant piece of convertible hardware crippled by its slate-friendly software.

Someone at Lenovo must have been listening to our complaints, because just a few months later we’re reviewing the IdeaPad Yoga 11S, a follow-up that ditches its predecessor’s mobile processor in favor of a full-blown Intel Core i5 chip. More important, this Yoga runs the full-blown version of Windows 8.

So does this dreamed-of refresh cure what ailed the original IdeaPad Yoga 11? Largely, though the $999 Yoga 11S introduces a few new compromises of its own.

Considering its Intel Core i5-3339Y processor and 8GB of RAM, no one will confuse the Yoga 11S with a slate; of course, no one will mistake it for a graphics powerhouse, either. Its reliance on the integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 hardware caused the laptop to chug through our graphics-focused tests, while the merely passable 1.5GHz clock on the Ultrabook-class processor kept the Yoga 11S firmly in the middle of the pack (at best) in the rest of PCWorld’s battery of benchmarks. On the plus side, the Yoga 11S’s solid-state drive delivers lickety-split boot and wake times.

But don’t let the blah benchmark scores fool you: The Yoga 11S offered enough oomph to get me through my average workday, which is filled with documents, spreadsheets, Spotify, the occasional video, and scads of open browser tabs.

Lenovo's IdeaPad Yoga 11S beat up our reference notebook, but it fell behind Dell's Latitude 6430u Ultrabook.

The processor choice does create a few worrisome issues unrelated to performance, though. The Core i5-3339Y is an older Ivy Bridge processor rather than a newer, power-efficient Haswell chip, and Ivy Bridge wasn’t designed with superthin hybrid systems in mind. The underside of the Yoga 11S becomes noticeably warm when you’re doing anything but basic Web browsing—not enough to make you scream in pain, but enough to make you notice and to ponder the wisdom of leaving it on your lap. The machine is remarkably whisper-silent; a heftier fan may have been a smart compromise.

Also, like virtually all Ivy Bridge laptops with touchscreens, the Yoga 11S struggles to stay alive for an extended period, giving up the ghost after 4 hours, 33 minutes in our battery test. Everyday use at full brightness drained the battery even faster than that. Say what you will about the original ARM-powered Yoga 11, at least it lasted around 9 hours.

The Yoga 11S is definitely a winner in the design department. If you’ve never encountered a Yoga laptop before, rest assured that the series lives up to its name, with each machine sporting a flexible hinge that allows you to flip the display back a full 360 degrees so that the screen rests against the bottom of the keyboard deck when you’re using the device in tablet mode. Aside from the tablet and traditional-laptop configurations, Lenovo actively promotes using Yoga laptops in tent mode (basically an upside-down V) and in stand mode (in which you flip the screen around so that the form resembles the typical 90-degree clamshell, but with the keys facing down). Both tent mode and stand mode are great for watching movies, and despite the Yoga 11S’s bendable nature, you won’t find any flex in its lid or keyboard.

The 11.6-inch IPS display impresses with its vivid colors, and dark scenes greatly benefit from the Yoga 11S’s deep blacks. The 1366 by 768 resolution is a bit of a bummer in tablet mode, but it holds up well during laptop usage on account of the system’s small screen. An overactive ambient-light sensor proved annoying, though easy to disable.

The audio lacks bass and pure punch-you-in-the-ear volume levels, even with its Dolby Home Theater v4 certification, but it’s decent enough for such a diminutive machine.

The connectivity situation flat-out disappoints, however. Although Ultrabooks and tablets alike regularly skimp on the ports, the Yoga 11S takes matters to the extreme, limiting users to an HDMI-out, an SD Card reader, one USB 2.0 port, and one USB 3.0 port. You’ll find no ethernet connection (you’ll need to buy a USB ethernet adapter if you want the security of hardwired networking).

Look beyond the ports, and you’ll discover that handling the Yoga 11S is a delight. The sleek, silvery gray finish has a rubbery feel that makes the hybrid comfortable to hold and hard to drop. It’s attractive in a way that doesn’t call attention to itself. At 2.7 pounds and 0.67 inch at its thickest, this hybrid still falls firmly in the “notebook first” class of convertibles. But unlike the convertible competition, the diminutive Yoga 11S (not to mention its 11.6-inch screen) is small enough that using it as a slate doesn’t feel awkward—except when your fingers bump against the keyboard, which is left bare at the bottom of the device when you’re using the machine in tablet mode. (You quickly become accustomed to the feeling.)

Speaking of the island-style keyboard, the Yoga 11S’s is largely successful, with good spacing, a solid tactile feel, and a decent amount of key travel. The “leather touch” coating on the keyboard deck makes extended typing sessions blissfully chafe-free. It has no backlighting—a surprise in a laptop in this price range—but my only real qualm is that the keys themselves sit just a wee bit too shallow and close to the deck. Again, you quickly become accustomed to it. One other gripe: Placing the power button along the front lip was a questionable design decision. It’s hard to find out of the box, and an annoyance to reach in everyday use.

Both the buttonless clickpad and the ten-point touchscreen display support Windows 8’s gesture controls and are wonderfully responsive. Lenovo also includes motion-control software with the laptop, but it feels gimmicky, especially when the touchscreen and touchpad shine so brightly. Most of the preinstalled software is of dubious value, actually—and with more than a dozen apps and programs included on the Yoga 11S, “bloatware” is definitely an appropriate term.

The Lenovo Yoga 11S is a massive improvement over the original Yoga 11, but it still falls short of hybrid heaven. No hybrid has ever come so close to marrying a notebook’s ergonomics and performance with a reasonably portable 11-inch design. Discounting hobbled Windows RT slates entirely, the competition consists primarily of tablet-first designs that make extreme compromises on the typing experience, such as the Sony Duo 11 and Microsoft’s own Surface Pro.

Lenovo’s Yoga 11S is an absolute joy to use. With a $999 price tag, however, it’s hard to overlook the laptop’s ho-hum performance and medicore battery life. If Lenovo ever decides to update the Yoga 11S with one of Intel’s power-sipping fourth-generation Core processors, the result could be convertible perfection.

Brad Chacos spends the days jamming to Spotify, digging through desktop PCs and covering everything from BYOD tablets to DIY tesla coils.
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Review: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga 11 is convertible, portable, and…it runs Windows RT

Microsoft’s vice president of Windows planning may be confident that Windows RT is destined for great things, but I—and the rest of the world—have some doubts. The ARM-based operating system has limits (such as the inability to install legacy apps, or apps from outside the Windows Store) that just don’t belong on laptops.

And while Lenovo’s $949 IdeaPad Yoga 11 may be trending toward tablet status, it’s still very much a laptop. In fact, the Yoga 11 is much more of a laptop than some of its competitors, such as the Dell XPS 10 and the Asus VivoTab RT. The XPS 10 and the VivoTab RT have detachable keyboard docks, while the Yoga 11 has a more unique form factor: Its keyboard doesn’t detach, but you can flip the entire screen around 360 degrees to have a slate-like experience.

So for all intents and purposes, the Yoga 11 is a laptop, not a tablet, but it’s running a tablet’s operating system. As you can imagine, this creates a few issues: You can’t download a third-party browser, for example, nor can you install some of the older applications you’re used to working with. You’re limited to apps that you can download in the Windows Store, which might not be a great thing considering Windows 8 app development has slowed in recent months. All of this is pretty unfortunate, because the Yoga 11 is an otherwise well-made product with potential as a replacement for your 15-incher and your tablet.

The Yoga 11 is the younger, lesser-equipped brother of Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga 13, which, as you may remember, I liked…a lot. The Yoga 11 features the same silver-gray rubbery finish, black chiclet-style keyboard, and moderately thick bezel surrounding its smooth glass touchscreen, as its predecessor. Its 11.6-inch capacitive touchscreen has a native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels, and features bright, crisp colors. It’s a great touchscreen to use, too: accurate, smooth, and as similar to a tablet experience as you’ll get on a laptop. The touch sensitivity appears to extend just beyond the bezel, which makes certain Windows RT gestures (such as swiping from the right side to see the menu) very easy and intuitive.

The Yoga 11 lives up to its name: It’s super, super flexible, both literally and figuratively. You can use it in traditional clamshell mode (keyboard in front, screen at a 90- or near-90-degree angle), or you can bend the screen 360 degrees around the hinge. There are four modes that Lenovo sanctions: the aforementioned clamshell laptop mode, tablet mode (the screen folded all the way back so that the keyboard is now on the back), tent mode (the screen folded back so that the laptop is propped up on its edges), and stand mode (like reverse clamshell—this time, the keyboard is behind the screen and facing downward, while the screen is at an angle so you can watch movies or play games).

The Yoga 11’s biggest advantage over other laptop-tablet hybrids is its built-in keyboard. Not only is the keyboard built-in (so that’s an inherent advantage over plain tablets), but it’s actually a really, really good keyboard. It’s full-sized, with island-style keys and a small glass touchpad. The keys offer excellent tactile feedback, and they’re very comfortable and easy to type on for long periods of time. For a small system, the keys have just enough weight to ensure accurate typing. I honestly like this keyboard better than the one on the 11-inch MacBook Air (and that’s my primary laptop, at the moment).

It’s also got great battery life: In our tests we managed just shy of nine hours.

The Yoga 11 has a couple of disadvantages worth noting (aside from Windows RT). Our review model comes with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of onboard storage, both of which are a little weak in this era of computing. You already know it runs on an ARM processor (an Nvidia Tegra 3, to be exact), and its speakers are a little on the quiet side. It’s also got only two USB 2.0 ports—no USB 3.0 in sight. So it’s still more tablet than laptop in some ways.

I’ve been a big fan of Lenovo’s Yoga series from the start, and I love laptops that can fit in my purse…so the Yoga 11 is pretty tempting. But it’s not thin enough (0.61 inches) or light enough (2.8 pounds) to justify its tablet OS, and Windows RT has too many limitations for this to be a viable work computer. So, unlike its big brother (which was too heavy to be a tablet, but powerful and usable enough to be a laptop), the Yoga 11 is stuck somewhere in the middle.

The Yoga 11 has a unique, easy-to-use design and a great keyboard. The Windows RT and its dwindling app selection, however, will make me wait until Lenovo decides to release a full Windows 8-equipped 11-incher.

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
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Review: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Y500 offers excellent gaming specs for the price

At first glance, the Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 doesn’t look like anything special.

This thick, heavy (6.2-pound), 15.6-inch laptop is encased in a plain, sturdy chassis with a brushed-aluminum cover. It’s sleek-looking, though strangely prone to fingerprints. Lenovo’s logo is subtly appliquéd in the upper left corner, and the edges of the corner taper ever so slightly.

Nothing would indicate that this is actually a rather powerful—and surprisingly affordable—gaming-oriented machine with a third-generation Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and not one but two Nvidia GeForce GT 650M graphics cards under the hood. (The second graphics card is wedged into the laptop’s “Ultrabay,” which is Lenovo’s term for the swappable drive bay that replaces the DVD drive.)

Of course, our review model, in all its spec’d out glory—it’s also got a 1TB hard drive, a 16GB SSD boot drive, a glossy full HD display, and a full-sized backlit keyboard with a 10-key numberpad—starts at around $1150. That’s a bit pricier than the $800 base model of the Y500, but it’s still a great price for a gaming laptop.

Performance-wise, this build of the Y500 is very good, though it can’t quite hold its own with the more intense gaming models. It received a score of 70 (out of 100) on our WorldBench 8 benchmark tests, which puts it well above most mainstream laptops, but still below behemoths like the $3785 Origin EON17-SLX (which scored 115 out of 100). Still, this is one of the better laptops we’ve tested, and its graphics performance is comparable to that of the EON17-SLX. In our Dirt Showdown graphics test, the Y500 managed 116.1 frames per second (fps), while the EON17-SLX managed 139.5 fps.

In other words: If you’re a gamer, this is a viable, and much more affordable, alternative to an Origin desktop replacement.

The Y500 looks good, too, and offers sturdily-built, comfortable components. The full-sized keyboard has chiclet-style, red-rimmed keys set against a shiny black background. The keyboard is extremely comfortable to type on, with great tactile feedback and nice, evenly-spaced keys. The red backlight gives it a pop of color, though I have one minor complaint, as a gamer: The keys are so evenly-spaced (and the numberpad is right next to the keyboard) that a multi-color backlight would be helpful. It’s hard to distinguish where keys are, quickly, with an all-red keyboard.

The Y500’s touchpad is large and easy to use, but nobody really cares. This is a gaming machine, which means you’re most likely going to use an external mouse. The touchpad was a tad jumpy and oversensitive, in my opinion, but it can be disabled with a quick function keystroke.

The Y500’s screen is one of its biggest assets, even though when you tap it—and you will, this is Windows 8, after all—you’ll discover that it’s not a touchscreen. The screen itself looks great: It’s big, bright, and crisp, colors look accurate, and off-axis viewing angles are pretty good. It’s got a full HD resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, and high-motion content looks excellent in playback. But it’s still…not a touchscreen. Of course, this isn’t quite as big of a deal because it’s a gaming machine—touchscreens aren’t really the gamer’s instrument of choice. But since it does have Windows 8, it’s a bit frustrating to realize that you can’t take advantage of all the awesome swipe gestures that Windows 8 has to offer. That said, it’s important to remember that even the uber-pricey Origin EON17-SLX doesn’t have a touchscreen either.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Y500 is a great choice as a gaming laptop that’s lighter and cheaper than your typical desktop-replacement monstrosity. Despite a few minor drawbacks, overall it’s a great machine that offers excellent performance and specs for the price.

Sarah is a freelance writer and editor based in Silicon Valley. She has a love/hate relationship with social media and a bad habit of describing technology as "sexy."
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Lenovo IdeaPad S400 Hands-On: Great Keyboard, Soft-Touch Chassis

The IdeaPad S400 comes in three colors: silver gray, cotton-candy pink and crimson red, with the lid and bottom both painted in the theme color while the deck, bezel and hinges remain black. There’s no question that the crimson red color is the real star of the show and the photos in this post just don’t do it justice. Looking at the red lid and smooth red bottom, which has matching crimson rubber feed and even a series of attractive looking air vents, you might forget this is a laptop and start thinking it’s a sports car.

Even better, the S400's lid, bottom and deck are all soft-touch surfaces that have a comfy, rubberized feel. When we placed our hands on the soft-touch deck and began typing, our wrists felt like they were lying on top of gel pad wrist rest. Normally, a soft-touch finish like that is only found in expensive, high-end notebooks like the ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

At 3.96 pounds and just .86 inches thick, the S400 really looks quite slim and felt light light in our hands. Though it’s not Ultrabook-light, you can carry this notebook anymore and fit it into any bag.

While Lenovo’s ThinkPads are known for their worldclass keyboards, many of its IdeaPads haven’t followed suit. Sure, the “Accutype” keyboards on IdeaPads look a lot like the ThinkPad’s new island-style keyboard, but many of them just don’t have the same sharp tactile feel. In fact, the IdeaPad Z500 and U510 that we saw this week had keyboards that weren’t as tactile as we’d like and even suffered from some flex.

Fortunately, the IdeaPad S400's keyboard also feels like a ThinkPad keyboard, with strong tactile feedback and a rock solid, flex-free base. Combine the great feel of the keys with the soft-touch palmrest and you have a truly fantastic typing experience.

As with any sub-$500 notebook, the IdeaPad S400 does have a few feature that are not particularly premium. The plastic hinges on the lid made creaking noises and seemed really flimsy on the demo units we tested (we hope this is fixed on production models) and the low-res, 1366 x 768 screen was nothing to type home about.

You can spec-out the IdeaPad S400 with up to a Core i5 or AMD A8 quad-core CPU, and can speed boot times with a 32GB SSD cache so this system should offer reasonable mid-range performance to go with its touted 5-hour battery life. But even with the base configuration, you get a fantastic keyboard and red-hot design for under $500. Based on what we saw in our hands-on, that seems like a bargain.

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Deal of the Day: Save 46% On Lenovo IdeaPad Core i7 Quad-Core Laptop

If you’re looking for a 15-inch business notebook with a blazing-fast processor and plenty of memory, today’s deal of the day is for you. The 15.6-inch Lenovo IdeaPad Z570 boasts a 2nd Generation Intel Core i7 quad-core processor, 8GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive — more than enough power to handle business tasks with juice to spare. Normally $1,199, the Lenovo IdeaPad Z570 is available for just $649 plus free shipping through a deal at LogicBUY.

In addition to its powerful processor, large hard drive and plenty of RAM, the IdeaPad Z570 features Intel HD graphics, a DVD burner and a 2-megapixel webcam. Best of all for professionals on the go, the notebook is only 5.73 pounds and 0.78-inches thin. The ThinkPad Z570 is available in grey, blue, or black designs.

Base specs: Intel 2nd Gen Core i7 Quad-core processor, 8GB of RAM, Intel HD Graphics, 500GB HDD, 15.6-inch HD LCD Display, DVD Burner

Lenovo IdeaPad Z570 15.6-inch Laptop with a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 500GB HDD for $649 through LogicBUY.

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Deal of the Day: Save $650 on Lenovo IdeaPad U400

If you’re in the market for a sleek notebook with discrete graphics, you should check out Lenovo’s IdeaPad U400. Although the device isn’t best in its class, if you’re looking to a substantial amount, say $650, the IdeaPad U400 may be for you. The laptop, originally $1,549, is going for $899 today plus free shipping through a deal with LogicBUY.

When we reviewed the laptop, we liked its stylish design, fast wake from sleep, graphics performance and touchpad shortcuts. We weren’t as pleased with its finicky touchpad, shallow keyboard and lack of an SD card slot. Earning a rating of three out of five stars, the device was coined the Ultrabook’s ‘bigger brother.’

Base specs: Core i7 processor, 8GB RAM, 750GB 5400rmp HDD, AMD 6470M 1GB graphics, Bluetooth 2.1, Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)

Lenovo IdeaPad U400 14-inch Ultrathin Laptop w/Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM for $899 through LogicBUY

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