Expectations are often low in the extreme-budget zone of the market for Windows laptops. The Lenovo IdeaPad 1 14 ($299 as tested) defies them: It packs in a full HD display, a comfortable keyboard, and reassuring build quality—features you can’t often find in a $300 Win 10 machine. Plus, this 14-inch notebook is lightweight and comes with a speedy SSD for quick app-loading times. You’ll probably miss having a modern USB-C port or two (the chassis has none), and you might mind the relatively dim screen backlight, but otherwise this laptop is one the better picks among laptops for the very tightest budgets.
When Bare-Bones Is Just Enough
Lenovo’s IdeaPad brand is a competitor to Dell’s Inspiron and HP’s Pavilion lineups. All three of these laptop families offer models with multiple screen sizes and form factors. You can find 2-in-1 convertible IdeaPad 5 laptops priced above $1,000 in kitted-out configs. Or, you can start from the bottom with the IdeaPad 1, if you’re looking for a bare-bones computing experience that will still let you answer emails and browse the web in comfort.
Moving from the $500 limit that we typically use to define the budget-laptop category down to the $300 level does come with some compromises, however. The IdeaPad 1 14 reviewed here features a dual-core AMD Athlon SIlver 3050e processor and just 4GB of memory. That’s enough to browse the web with a single browser tab open or edit a Microsoft Word document without any major lag or sluggishness, but only just. Anything more complex than these types of tasks will likely cause the IdeaPad 1 14 to balk.
To see why, consider that a $500 laptop will typically have 8GB of memory and use a far more capable AMD Ryzen or Intel Core processor. Our current top pick, the MSI Modern 14, checks both of these boxes. However, what separates this IdeaPad 1 14 from the bargain-laptop sub-basement (inhabited by the likes of the $200 HP Stream 11) is a speedy SSD. Many of the cheapest Windows laptops and Chromebooks use eMMC flash storage for their boot drives, which is a less-capable storage medium and can contribute to hangs and sluggishness.
Gray or Ice Blue Color Options
The IdeaPad 1 14 is rather bland-looking compared with the MSI Modern 14, and it’s a bit bigger too, despite having the same-size screen. The IdeaPad measures 0.78 by 12.9 by 9.25 inches (HWD) and weighs 3.1 pounds, compared with 0.7 by 12.6 by 8.6 inches and 2.8 pounds for the MSI. The size difference is especially noticeable in the display bezels. They’re chunky strips of black plastic on the IdeaPad 1 14, while the Modern 14’s slimmer bezels help match its aesthetic to its name.
But while the IdeaPad 1 14 might not be as modern-looking as some of its competitors, neither is it ugly. Our review unit is gray, which is vaguely sleek without being boring. This is not a svelte premium ultraportable like the Dell XPS 13, nor is it a corporate-chic laptop like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon. But after using it intermittently for a few days around the house, I found that it certainly looks like it belongs on your coffee table or kitchen, and probably would do just as well in a fluorescent-lit classroom.
If you don’t like gray, you can also find the IdeaPad 1 14 in the alternative Ice Blue finish from some retailers, including Newegg, although stock changes frequently. At publication time, Newegg was selling the Ice Blue version at a $20 discount, for a total price of $279. Both colors have the same component specifications.
A Comfortable Typing Experience
Lenovo, maker of the ThinkPad business laptops and their supremely comfortable keyboards, knows what goes into a decent typing experience. The IdeaPad 1 14’s keyboard isn’t quite as comfortable as what you’ll find on a ThinkPad, suffering a bit from wobbly key switches and the lack of a backlight. But the keys are well-spaced, the label font is easy to read, and there’s very little flex in the keyboard deck when you type forcefully.
The laptop’s power button is part of the top row of function keys, which also includes a nifty button to disable the webcam. The camera lacks face recognition, and there’s no fingerprint reader, which means the IdeaPad 1 14 doesn’t support Windows Hello password-less logins. But at this price, we don’t expect it to. The IdeaPad 1 14’s touchpad is comfortable, with a generously sized clickable surface that is a bit stiff in the upper portion but tracks reasonably well.
Input and output ports on a budget laptop are frequently a grab bag—you never know quite what you’re going to get, as the number and type of ports are constrained by whichever inexpensive motherboard design the laptop maker has sourced or concocted. For the IdeaPad 1 14, Lenovo has placed all but one of the ports on the left edge of the laptop. They include the connector for the barrel-style power adapter, two USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports, a full-size HDMI video output, and a microSD card slot.
The inclusion of the card reader and the video output isn’t necessarily unique in the budget category. The Modern 14 and the Stream 11 also include them. But many more expensive laptops do not, and they’re useful if you want to connect to an external display at home or you need a quick and cheap way to augment the laptop’s external storage. The only concerning omission among the ports is the lack of any oval-shaped USB-C connectors. The sole port on the right-hand side is a 3.5mm audio combo jack.
A Crisp Full HD Display
The full HD display is one of the highlights of the IdeaPad 1 14, helping it stand out from the sea of lower-quality screens on laptops one rung down the price ladder. The screen measures 14 inches on the diagonal, which is a bit larger than the 13.3 inches common on other ultraportable laptops. Colors are well-defined, and text is crisp, thanks in large part to the 1,920-by-1,080-pixel native resolution. Many budget laptops are limited to HD resolution, which usually works out to pixel dimensions of 1,366 by 768, and can make text look fuzzy on a 14-inch or 13-inch screen.
Our only complaint with the IdeaPad 1 14’s display is that the backlight is rather dim, rated for just 220 nits of maximum brightness. Set at max, the brightness is adequate for most indoor viewing conditions, although viewability quickly decreased once I moved the brightness slider down a few notches. The matte-finish screen has no touch support, but it does an excellent job of reducing glare from ambient light.
Wireless connectivity on the IdeaPad 1 14 is limited to the older Bluetooth 4.2 and 802.11ac Wi-Fi standards, which is normal for this price category. Also normal is plenty of unwanted preinstalled software known as bloatware, which can bring in added revenue for manufacturers and helps keep asking prices low. On the IdeaPad 1 14, you’ll find a smattering of free trials for apps like McAfee and Mirkat, which purports to let you know if your email address has been compromised in a data breach.
Testing the IdeaPad 1 14: Just Getting Work Done
After several days of testing, I noticed no hangs or crashes when installing apps or browsing the web with a single browser tab open on the IdeaPad 1 14. There is occasional sluggishness, especially when resizing or maximizing app windows, but overall the user experience that this laptop offers is remarkably smooth. You will need to switch out of Windows 10 S Mode to install some apps, since S Mode limits the laptop to apps downloaded from the Microsoft Store, but switching to the full version of Windows 10 Home is easy and free.
To see how its performance stacks up against a few key competitors, I compared the IdeaPad 1 14’s benchmark results with those of the Modern 14 and three other laptops. (See more about how we test laptops.)
The Asus VivoBook 15 and Lenovo IdeaPad 3 15 are one rung up the price and size ladder, with more capable Ryzen and Core processors and larger 15-inch screens. The Asus Laptop L410 is more of a direct competitor to the IdeaPad 1 14, with a comparable Intel Celeron processor and a $265 asking price. Here’s a glance at the key specs…
On the PCMark 10 test, none of these models reached the 4,000 mark, which we typically regard as indicating excellent performance on every day tasks like word processing, web browsing, and videoconferencing. The IdeaPad 1 is distinctly behind the VivoBook 15 and IdeaPad 3 15, though solidly ahead of the Asus Laptop L410 on this test.
PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a Storage subtest that we use to assess the speed of the laptop’s boot drive. This score is also a proprietary numeric score; again, higher numbers are better. All of the systems with SSDs perform quite well on this test; the Asus Laptop L410 has a slower eMMC drive that couldn’t even complete the PCMark 8 test.
Our next trials are CPU-intensive multimedia workflows, which aren’t the sort of tasks at all suited to a budget laptop. Still, it’s nice to see that the IdeaPad 1 14 isn’t far behind the Core i3-equipped Modern 14 when it comes to rendering a 3D image in Cinebench and converting a 4K video to 1080p in Handbrake. One plus I noted during all of these tests: The laptop’s cooling fan was barely audible, suggesting that the machine expertly handles the heat its components generate under heavy loads.
With only 4GB of memory, the IdeaPad 1 14 can’t run Adobe Photoshop, so we were unable to run our image editing benchmark. But the laptop could hack the 3DMark and Superposition gaming benchmarks, which resulted in predictably lackluster scores. The IdeaPad 1 14 is not a gaming laptop, achieving an average of just 10 frames per second on the forgiving 720p Low Superposition test. But you shouldn’t expect to play 3D games on a laptop this inexpensive, anyway. (Read more about the limits of gaming on laptop integrated graphics.)
You should expect reasonable battery life, though, and here the IdeaPad 1 14 won’t let you down. It lasted for 12 hours away from the power outlet on our video rundown test, which involves playing a 720p video file at 50% screen brightness with Wi-Fi turned off.
Our test is something of a best-case battery scenario, but it’s nice to know that even if you’re planning to use the IdeaPad 1 14 for more demanding tasks, you won’t suffer from battery anxiety.
A Simple, Solid Extreme-Budget Laptop
The IdeaPad 1 14 is a simple machine, but it’s well-designed and has nearly everything you’d expect from a no-nonsense laptop that allows you to check emails and get schoolwork or other light tasks done with relative ease. A “true” 128GB SSD (as opposed to an eMMC drive) and a roomy 14-inch full HD display are arguably the star attractions, with the comfortable keyboard and reasonably modern styling playing important backup roles.
The only things potentially missing from this fine budget laptop are USB-C ports and a more capable Ryzen or Core processor. For the latter, you’ll need to step up to the MSI Modern 14, which is currently our top pick in the budget-laptop category. But if you need to shed another $100 or $150 from your spend versus the Modern 14, this is one of the best picks in its price zone.
