The Lenovo IdeaPad 1 14 81VS0001US is one of the cheapest laptops during this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. Best Buy will sell this 14-inch notebook for only $119.99. That’s with a free 1-year Microsoft (Office) 365 Personal subscription. So what’s the catch?
If you’re planning to use the laptop only for the basic home and office tasks, the Lenovo IdeaPad 1 81VS009GUS can be described as “usable”. The biggest drawback is its generally weak processor – the AMD A6-9220e. It is suitable only for light computing duties like web browsing, MS Office apps, music and movie playback, and similar. But even in these tasks, the A6-9220e won’t be able to deliver as smooth user experience as with the mainstream mid-range or higher processors from the AMD Ryzen or Intel Core U series. However, if you wan’t to open a web page or two, do some text editing, or play an online video, the IdeaPad 1 81VS009GUS will enable you to do that. The A6-9220e includes the AMD Radeon R4 integrated graphics. The AMD A6 CPU and Radeon R4 as a very basic graphics processor can handle only the lightest computer games.
Furthermore, the Lenovo IdeaPad 1 81VS009GUS has a quite limited internal storage space. The laptop has only 64 Gigabytes of eMMC storage, which is very small by today’s notebook standards. But, if you don’t install many Windows programs and don’t plan to save large amounts of data on the laptop, then 64GB size can be enough.
As for the system memory (RAM) which is responsible for multi-tasking ability of a laptop, the included size of 4GB is a bare minimum for normal laptop PC use. If you usually don’t run many programs at the same time and don’t regularly use tens of web browser tabs at the same time, then 4GB will be enough. Thankfully, the laptop has a microSD card slot in which you can install a compatible memory card to expand the storage space.
As expected, the Lenovo IdeaPad 1 81VS009GUS has a very basic display. The 14-incher sports HD resolution, without sharpness of Full HD and higher resolutions. The display is based on TN technology, providing much narrower viewing angles than IPS screens.
The Lenovo IdeaPad 1 comes with a 35 WHr battery. That’s a relatively low capacity, but the notebook’s computing platform is among the power-efficient ones. Lenovo claims the IdeaPad 1 14 has a battery life of “up to 8 hours”.
A good thing about this notebook model is its portability thanks to its light weight of 3.1 pounds and thin 0.7″ profile.
The laptop’s chassis is made of plastics in “platinum gray” color.
2 out of 5 Speed of access
Tony –
Start up getting to Google Chrome very slow and takes forever to access any website. I have a Lenovo Ideapad 130S 11″ I bought last year with an Intel chip that works super fast. Why the difference?
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Dan –
What storage device is included? Hard drive storage is much slower than SSD and eMMC, especially when opening programs and starting Windows. Also, processor’s speed and RAM size can have big impact on that.
I use it as a chromebook. Took off all the other junk. Seems to be better not using windows.
swacman –
I only paid $120 so at that price it”s ok.
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SA’TARA TYLER –
how were able to achieve this conversion? I am having trouble even getting websites to load on this darn thing.
Girly –
Can I install simcard in this laptop
Dan –
This laptop doesn’t have a built-in SIM card slot.
Question
Lucas –
Its possible add a ssd ?
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Question
Tiffany –
What Walt charger this use I mistakenly threw mines away?
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Jack Spratt –
Charger is 45 watts at 20 volts output.
Bon Jovi –
Should have thrown the whole thing away. After uninstalling factory installed garbage and using CCleaner I still only have access to 20 gig free drive storage because the useless restoration partition. Multitasking from Youtube to anything else is complete lagfest. Was able to get it to play the Hearthstone card game, but any game with basic 2D graphics is stupidly unresponsive.
Question
Frank –
Can you use it with dj sofware
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Ember –
The one I bought my daughter definitely has a webcam. But the RAM is overloaded simply trying to use zoom for school. Looks like it’s soldered to the board too. Looking at other options now.
Jim –
Yes, there is a camera. Not a good one, but it’s there1