How To Fast Windows 7 Performance

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At a Glance

Expert'south Rating

Pros

Facial and fingerprint biometrics
Dolby Atmos sound
Thunderbolt 3 port
Discrete graphics

Cons

Middling battery life
Pedestrian design

Our Verdict

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim vii delivers both performance and value in a slim and trim shell, fifty-fifty if its battery life isn't quite what we'd hoped.

Best Prices Today: Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 14IIL05 82A4000MUS

Packed with features sure to make productivity mavens happy, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim seven delivers both functioning and value in a slim and trim shell, even if its battery life isn't quite what we'd hoped.

Powered by a Core i5 Ice Lake processor and armed with discrete GeForce MX350 graphics, this configuration of the IdeaPad Slim 7 ($880 from Lenovo) deftly handles burdensome CPU loads and Adobe Premiere-level graphical chores. It also boasts such niceties as a Thunderbolt 3 port, facial and fingerprint biometrics, Dolby Atmos sound, and Wi-Fi 6 support.

The IdeaPadSlim 7's battery life fell a little curt of our expectations, and the laptop'south staid blueprint, while pleasingly slim, won't wow anybody (which shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with Lenovo'south IdeaPad line). Still, it offers a good characteristic set for this price range (or even cheaper, if you lot can grab Lenovo'due south "instant" discount).

This review is part of our ongoing roundup of the best laptops. Go there for information on competing products and how we tested them.

Configuration

Lenovo offers five versions of the IdeaPad Slim 7, ranging from our unit (82A4000MUS) to a $i,130 (or $ane,017 mail service-discount) version with a Cadre i7-1065G7 CPU, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and an integrated Intel Iris Plus GPU. There are also IdeaPad Slim 7 models powered by AMD Ryzen 4000-series chips (here's our performance preview), only Lenovo is currently out of stock. More units are in the pipeline, nosotros're told.

Here are the detailed specifications on the organisation we reviewed:

CPU: Quad-core Intel Core i5-1035G1 (Water ice Lake)
Memory: 8GB LPDDR3 3200MHz
Graphics: Discrete Nvidia GeForce MX350
Storage: 512GB SSD
Display: fourteen-inch FHD (1920×1080) IPS, 300 nits, not-affect
Webcam: 720p
Connectivity: One Thunderbolt three port, one USB SuperSpeed 5Gbps Type-C, two USB SuperSpeed 5Gbps Type-A, HDMI, combo audio jack, microSD slot
Networking: Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.0
Biometrics: IR facial recognition, fingerprint sensor
Battery capacity: lx.7 Watt-hour
Dimensions: 12.62 x 8.nineteen x 0.58 inches
Weight: 3.two pounds (measured), 0.68-pound Air conditioning adapter

Simply looking at the specs, this is a rock-solid configuration for the price, starting with the peppy Core i5 Ice Lake CPU, the roomy 512GB SSD, and the 8GB of depression-ability RAM (though 16GB would accept been better). The detached MX350 graphics bill of fare won't deliver silky gaming visuals, merely it should do the trick for content creators.

You likewise get a reasonably vivid 14-inch full-Hd display. It's not-touch, unfortunately, although pricier SKUs do offer touchscreens. The Thunderbolt iii port is great for connecting dual 4K displays and speedy external storage, and a pair of SuperSpeed USB-A ports handle legacy peripherals. More than goodies include facial and fingerprint biometrics, plus Wi-Fi vi (fourth dimension to pull the trigger on that Wi-Fi half dozen router yous've been pining for), while the bulky threescore.7-Watt-hour bombardment promises plenty of battery life (as we'll meet in our performance section).

Pattern

True to its name, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim seven'due south 0.58-inch profile is svelte, merely the laptop's aluminum, slate-gray lid is completely featureless save for a minor "Lenovo" logo on the side. In other words (and equally with other laptops in Lenovo's IdeaPad line), don't expect the Slim 7 draw any envious looks while you're out and about. Still, nosotros appreciate the lip along the summit edge of the lid, which makes it easier to pry the laptop open with your fingertip.

lenovo ideapad slim 7 14iil05 rear — Equally far as the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7'southward design goes, well … it's what's inside that counts, right?

Opening the lid reveals more than of the aforementioned, with a slate-gray, spill-resistant keyboard and palmrest matched by a glass trackpad. The 14-inch display is surrounded by relatively thin side and tiptop bezels, with a slightly chunkier bezel forth the bottom. A long, flat hinge allows the lid to open all the style to a 180-degree bending, which could come in handy if you want to flip the display for a slideshow or PowerPoint presentation.

Weighing in at 3.ii pounds, the IdeaPad Slim seven feels a tad heavy for its size. That said, a sub-three-pound laptop with the Slim 7'due south feature set would probably cost a few hundred dollars more.

Display

Rated at 300 nits of brightness, the Lenovo Slim 7's xiv-inch full-Hard disk drive brandish looked abrupt and bright to my eyes. I generally kept the brightness setting downward in the 70- to 80-per centum range while testing the laptop indoors–cranking the effulgence upward to 100 per centum made the screen uncomfortably brilliant. The display was besides like shooting fish in a barrel to run across outside nether an umbrella, although its glossy finish makes for tough reading in direct sunlight.

The Slim 7's IPS (in-plane switching) display boasts characteristically wide viewing angles. The screen dims but slightly when viewed from the sides or to a higher place. Even when looking at the brandish from shut to a 90-degree angle, I had picayune problem reading the text in an on-screen Word document.

Keyboard, trackpad, speakers, and extras

The IdeaPad Slim 7's keyboard feels swell to type on. The keys themselves offer plenty of travel, and keystrokes feel snappy and springy, perfect for gorging typists. Fifty-fifty better, the keyboard is quiet plenty that you won't disturb those in shut proximity. Yous besides get hotkeys for mic mute, airplane mode, Windows ten settings Windows lock, Task View, and the Figurer app. In that location aren't whatsoever media playback hotkeys.

lenovo ideapad slim 7 keyboard — The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim seven boasts a comfy, snappy keyboard, while its touchpad does a nice chore or rejecting false inputs.

The Slim seven's drinking glass-covered touchpad felt smooth and responsive. Crucially, information technology did a fine job of rejecting false inputs, both during the regular grade of my typing and also when I deliberately smushed my palms into the bottom corners of the trackpad. I noticed perhaps a couple instances of a herky-hasty cursor during several weeks of testing, but otherwise, it was smooth sailing.

The IdeaPad's fingerprint sensor is embedded into the ability push button that sits on the correct side of the laptop, upwards about the hinge. The fingerprint reader was clumsily finicky during my testing, perchance because of the sensor's slightly awkward positioning on the side of the laptop. In whatsoever case, I frequently had to rescan my fingertip before successfully unlocking my Windows profile. Luckily, I had much better luck with the IR camera, which worked pretty much flawlessly and made unlocking the Slim 7 a breeze. One time I got started with facial recognition on the laptop, I never looked dorsum.

Equipped with a pair of upfiring speakers that accept been optimized for Dolby Atmos, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 delivers impressive audio for a laptop, although (here comes our usual disclaimer) you lot'll get much improve sound from an external speaker or a pair of headphones. Tuning upwards "Alive and Let Dice" by Paul McCartney and Wings, the Slim 7'south speakers teased out plenty of particular while not ignoring the mid-range. At that place was even some decent bass—well, decent by laptop standards, anyhow. The Atmos-enabled speakers also managed to do a solid job of serving up a virtualized 3D soundstage (although once more, we're grading on a bend),. Yous tin can fine-tune the sound using the included Dolby Atmos desktop app.

The IdeaPad Slim 7's 720p webcam captures blotchy, done-out video that's adequate for Zoom and Skype video calls, simply just barely. If you're planning on presenting to a large group or if you're going on virtual chore interviews, yous'd exist better off with a defended webcam.

Ports

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim seven has just virtually every base covered when it comes to ports, including (on the left side) one that we rarely see in this price range: Thunderbolt 3, handy for connecting a pair of 4K monitors or hooking up a fully loaded laptop hub. As well on the left side is a full HDMI port, a combo audio jack, and a USB-C Power Delivery port.

lenovo ideapad slim 7 14iil05 left side — The left side of the Lenovo IdeaPad 7 features a Thunderbolt 3 port, a full HDMI port, a combo audio jack, and a USB-C ability port.

On the right, you'll detect a pair of USB SuperSpeed 5Gbps Type-A ports (we would have preferred SuperSpeed 10Gbps, but let's not go greedy) and a microSD card reader.

lenovo ideapad slim 7 14iil05 right side — A pair of USB SuperSpeed 5Gbps Type-A ports sit on the correct side, along with a microSD slot. A fingerprint reader is embedded in the power push.

All that'south missing is ethernet, although that'due south a lot to ask given the Slim seven's svelte design.

Click here to read nearly the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7'due south performance results

General performance

With its quad-core, Cadre i5 Water ice Lake CPU and discrete graphics, nosotros were expecting plenty of productivity power from the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7, and that's just what we got. The Slim 7 handles Role and daily PC duties with ease, information technology excels at shouldering multi-core CPU loads over lengthy periods, and it packs enough graphical punch to please content creators. That said, the IdeaPad Slim 7 falls more in the eye of the pack when information technology comes to delivering quick bursts of power, and we've seen better battery life.

PCMark 8 Piece of work Conventional

Our first benchmark measures how well a given laptop performs during such everyday computing chores equally web surfing, composing Word documents, tinkering with spreadsheets, and video conversation. Considering nearly of the tasks simulated by PCMark 8 crave only a single calculating core, laptops with fewer CPU cores remain on an even playing field with those that have more. A PCMark eight score of 2,000 or higher mostly means y'all'll see smooth Office performance.

lenovo ideapad slim 7 14iil05 pcmark 8 — The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 may accept landed in the bottom half of our PCMark 8 chart, just in general, *all* the laptops in our roundup aced the benchmark.

And then don't fret when you lot come across the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 sitting in the bottom half of our performance chart. Every laptop in the comparing puddle of like models breezed through the PCMark eight criterion with a score north of 3,000—easy peasy.

HandBrake

Our next benchmark involves using the free HandBrake utility to encode a 30GB .MOV video file into a format suitable for Android tablets. This lengthy, multi-core chore is guaranteed to spin up cooling fans as CPU temperatures brainstorm to soar. Given that it takes nigh an hour or and then to complete the examination, our HandBrake benchmark does a good task of showing us how a laptop handles heat buildup over time. In this example, laptops with the near cores generally go the all-time scores.

This time, the IdeaPad Slim 7 snags a solid third identify (shorter bars are ameliorate for HandBrake), backside a pair of other Ice Lake laptops with more powerful Cadre i7 CPUs, and notably ahead of some other laptop (the Acer Swift 3) with the aforementioned Core i5 processor as the Slim 7. For a slim-and-trim laptop in the IdeaPad's price range, any HandBrake score s of iv,000 is infrequent. The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim seven manages to sneak just below that marking, which is no small feat.

Cinebench

More of a sprint to HandBrake's marathon, Cinebench puts a laptop through its paces as information technology renders a 3D image in real time. Dissimilar the lengthy HandBrake benchmark, the Cinebench exam is by and large over in a matter of minutes, which means we await laptops with the fastest heave clocks to get the upper hand.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7's Cinebench functioning is more so-and so than it was for HandBrake, although to be fair, it's essentially neck-and-cervix with the fourth-place LG Gram and its Cadre i7 Comet Lake CPU. If anything, information technology'southward the Core i5 Comet Lake-powered Lenovo Yoga C740 that's the surprise, nestled in the elevation three with those ii Core i7 Ice Lake systems. Merely while the IdeaPad Slim 7 is a tad slower out of the gate than the Yoga C740, it's yet well ahead of the Acer Swift three and its identical Core i5 Ice Lake chip.

Nosotros are a tad concerned by the Slim seven'south single-threaded Cinebench performance, which is third-to-last in our chart, although the laptop's solid PCMark 8 score gives u.s.a. some condolement in terms of its unmarried-core efficiency.

3DMark Sky Diver

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim seven comes equipped with a discrete Nvidia GeForce MX350 graphics card, an entry-level GPU that won't set up your hair on burn down in terms of gaming simply should grease the wheels for Adobe Premiere and other content creation tools. We expected the Slim seven to top the charts for our 3DMark Sky Diver criterion, given that all the other laptops in our comparison simply have integrated graphics.

lenovo ideapad slim 7 14iil05 3dmark 8 — With its detached GeForce MX350 graphics menu, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 hands beats the other laptops in our chart with integrated graphics.

And at that place yous accept it. The 2 Cadre i7 Ice Lake systems brand a somewhat meliorate showing than the rest, due to their turbocharged Iris Plus graphics cores, just they nevertheless tin can't agree a candle to the Slim vii's discrete graphics.

Just to put things in perspective, we also ran a couple of quick gameplay benchmarks, lest anyone were to think that the IdeaPad Slim 7 is a full-on gaming motorcar. As expected, the Slim managed merely sub-30-fps visuals for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Rising of the Tomb Raider using their maxed-out graphics presets. To wring 60 fps or ameliorate from those ii crumbling AAA games, you'll either take to punch the graphics way dorsum or upgrade to a gaming laptop with, say, a GeForce GTX 1650 GPU or better.

Bombardment life

We test bombardment life on a laptop by looping a 4K video using the stock Windows Movies and Television app. We fix screen brightness set to approximately 250 nits and volume to l percentage, with headphones plugged in.

lenovo ideapad slim 7 14iil05 battery drain — The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7'due south bombardment life fell a bit short given its 60.vii watt-hour battery.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7'southward result here is incomparably meh. While the laptop's nearly 10.5-60 minutes performance sounds pretty good at start blush (recollect, of course, that the bombardment will bleed much faster during CPU-intensive activities), we were expecting more given the Slim 7'due south sizable lx.7 watt-hour battery. The Lenovo Yoga C740, for example, pretty much matches the Slim vii'south performance with a only a fifty watt-hour battery, while our chart-topping Lenovo Yoga C640 blows the Slim away with a threescore.3Whr battery that'due south similar to the Slim's.

So, what's the deal here? Offset, let'south consider the fact that the Slim 7's quad-cadre Core i5 Ice Lake CPU drains more power than the Yoga C640'southward dual-core Comet Lake scrap, which gives the less powerful C640 a large reward in terms of battery life. And then at that place'south the Slim seven'south detached graphics core, which draws more than power compared to the integrated graphics used past the other laptops in our chart. Finally, the Slim vii'south impressive CPU performance—especially during our HandBrake benchmark—may exist exacting a toll in the battery life section. (We ran our bombardment bleed tests using the Slim 7'southward default "Balanced" power programme.)

Bottom line

Nosotros wish the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 had more staying power in terms of battery life, and we wouldn't have minded faster burst performance, forth with a touchscreen. However, with its Core i5 Ice Lake CPU, discrete MX350 graphics, fingerprint and facial biometrics, Thunderbolt 3 port, and Atmos sound, the IdeaPad Slim 7 delivers an impressive arsenal of productivity tools for the toll, as long as you can live without all-day bombardment life.

All-time Prices Today: Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 14IIL05 82A4000MUS

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Ben has been writing about applied science and consumer electronics for more than twenty years. A PCWorld contributor since 2014, Ben joined TechHive in 2019, where he covers smart speakers, soundbars, and other smart and dwelling-theater devices. You tin follow Ben on Twitter.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/393788/lenovo-ideapad-slim-7-14iil05-review.html

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