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Our verdict
The Lenovo G50-45 is a very affordable notebook with a bright display and lightweight design, but its keyboard and short battery life mar the experience.
To the
Brightest display
Lightest in class
Relatively fast hard drive
Attractively priced
Against
Worst battery life in its class
Unresponsive keyboard
disposable feeling
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$171.36
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Buying a budget laptop usually comes with compromises, and Lenovo's G50-45 is no exception. For just $299, you get a relatively bright display and pretty solid quad-core AMD performance, but the design and the keyboard leaves a lot to be desired. The biggest compromise is the short battery life. The G50-45 is worth considering if you're on a really tight budget, but overall it's not one of those
best laptops
you can buy
draft
While the G50-45 isn't unattractive or uncomfortable, it looks every bit as affordable as its $300 price tag would suggest. See its black plastic body, deck (don't let the machined texture fool you), and glossy bezel look and feel like a disposable item.
Lenovo G50-45 at Amazon for $171.36
On the left edge of the G50-45 you will find a VGA port, an Ethernet port, an HDMI port, a USB 2.0 port and a USB 3.0 port. On the right side there is a headphone/microphone jack, a 2-in-1 card reader (SD/MMC), another USB 2.0 port, a DVD-RW drive and a Kensington lock slot.
Measuring 15.12 x 10.43 x 0.98 inches and weighing 4.6 pounds, the G50-45 is one of the slimmest budget laptops we've seen
Inspiron 15 5000
(5.11 pounds) and the
Asus X555LA
(5 pounds) add more weight to your bag during transportation.
display and audio
When watching the trailer for American Ultra on the G50-45's 15.6-inch HD (1366 x 768) display, the small text in the background looked clear, in contrast to the screens on the X555LA and Inspiron 15 which blurred the same text.
The G50-45's screen is also the brightest in its price range, averaging 238 nits of brightness. This helped the laptop stand out from the rest in head-to-head comparisons and gave fiery explosions more pop.
While I was able to get a lot of volume out of the G50-45 by cranking the audio to 100 percent, the sound quality was below average. The bass from Jay Z and Kanye West's "No Church in the Wild" sounded muffled, and the highs from Van Halen's "Hot For Teacher" fell short of the peaks they should have achieved.
Keyboard, touchpad and webcam
While some might associate Lenovo with the amazing keyboards found on the company's ThinkPad notebooks, the G50-45's keyboard was the worst of the budget laptop keyboards I've come across. Not only are they rippled at the bottom, a lot of my clicks became too not registered, which led to my worst 10FastFingers typing test result: 49 words per minute with a low accuracy of 89 percent. For comparison, on the Asus X555LA I got 63 wpm with an accuracy of 98 percent.
Part of my difficulty typing on the G50-45 stems from the fact that the keys only have 1.35 millimeters of travel - shorter than both the X555LA (1.55mm) and Inspiron 15 5000 (1.5mm), although the latter being the hub we're looking for in a notebook keyboard.
The G50-45 opts for a traditional touchpad with dedicated mouse buttons versus a more modern, clickable touchpad.
Windows 8:
Windows10:
The G50-45's webcam originally took photos that were about as low-quality and grainy as a laptop can take, but after I upgraded the device to Windows 10, the camera was upgraded as well not seen
Aspire E5
or the Asus X555LA, but see for yourself. The photo I took after switching to Windows 10 was in better lighting, but the jump in photo quality is too big to attribute to the setting.
perfomance
Powered by a 2GHz AMD A8-6410 quad-core processor with 6GB of RAM, with the Camera app open, the G50-45 processed a dozen open tabs in Chrome (including TweetDeck, Facebook, email and both video and as well as music streaming). a full system scan runs, all with ease. Adding another dozen tabs - simulating the activity I do on my laptop each day - slowed the system down a bit, but not as much as the Aspire E5.
The Geekbench 3 benchmark test, which measures overall performance, gave the G50-45 a good score of 3,759, which is above average for current budget notebooks (3,522). Unfortunately, its score is lower than that of the Inspiron 15 5000 (4,432) and the X555LA (4,220).
The G50-45 took a whopping 11 minutes and 48 seconds to match 20,000 names to their addresses in our spreadsheet test, much slower than the Inspiron 15 5000 (7:06) as well as the budget laptop category average (9:28) we're aiming for recently tested.
We put the G50-45 to a multitasking test, opening a 69MB Word document while a 1080p video was playing in the background. The Lenovo laptop took 40.9 seconds to complete the task, faster than that Average of the budget laptop category (52 seconds) and the Inspiron 15 5000 (41.2 seconds), but slower than the X555LA (34.6 seconds).
While we wouldn't buy a budget laptop to play, the G50-45 ran World of Warcraft (at 1366x768 resolution and automatic graphics) at a respectable 35 frames per second. That's above our 30fps standard for smooth gaming, the category average (28.7 fps) and the Inspiron 15 5000 (28.9 fps).
battery life and heat
Larger laptops like the G50-45 tend to stay away from commutes due to their size and weight, but even under 15-inch systems, this notebook offers poor battery life. In the Laptop Mag Battery Test (web surfing over WiFi with the display at 100 nits) The notebook lasted just 4 hours and 22 minutes, which is shorter than the category average (5:10) and the worst time among six budget laptops tested.
However, if you decide to use the G50-45 on your lap, you don't have to worry about getting burned. After 15 minutes of streaming HD video, the keyboard, touchpad, and bottom of the laptop measured just 87, 89, and 89, respectively degrees and thus remained below our 95-degree comfort threshold.
software
The G50-45 may come with some software preinstalled, but these programs (iHeartRadio, Flipboard, Kindle, and Evernote) are so well-respected that you can't delete them outright.
bottom line
At just $299, the Lenovo G50-45 is an affordable laptop with a bright screen and good performance for the price. However, the short battery life is disappointing and the keyboard doesn't live up to the Lenovo brand. Although it's $100 more costs, we recommend that
Dell Inspiron 15 5000
($399) due to better build quality, longer lifespan, and better typing feel.
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TODAY'S BEST DEALS
$171.36
at Amazon
$352.35
at Walmart
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at Amazon
Lenovo G50-45 specifications
Bluetooth
Bluetooth 4.0
brand
Lenovo
CPU
AMD Quad Core A8-6410
card slots
2-1 card reader
corporate website
www.lenovo.com
screen size
15.6
disk size
500GB
hard drive speed
5,400 rpm
native resolution
1366x768
operating system
Windows 8.1
optical drive
DVD RW
Connections (except USB)
Headphone/Microphone, USB 2.0, USB 3.0
R.A.M.
6GB
size
10.43 x 15.12 x 0.98 inches
touchpad size
4 x 2.1 inches
USB ports
3
Weight
4.6 pounds
Wireless Internet access
802.11b/g/n
Fewer
