Performance

Long battery life is one of the biggest benefits of any netbook. To test the battery life of the S10, I left all the power management settings on default. Under light usage (browsing the internet, checking email, instant messaging, etc.) the S10 was able to go a little over 5 hours between charges. However, under heavy load (100% CPU the whole time) I was only able to receive about 3 hours of battery life. That really isn’t horrible but there are still netbooks with better battery life than that. If I switched the power management settings to “Super Energy Saver” I was able to get about 7 hours of battery life. However at that point, I found the performance hit to be rather severe. The screen resolution of LCD on the S10 was too low for PC Mark 05 to run since PC Mark requires a resolution of at least 1024 x 768. In order to run PC Mark, I connected an external monitor to the VGA port and bumped the resolution up to 1024 x 768. This allowed PC Mark to run without problems and I was able to obtain a score of 1496. The detailed results of the PC Mark test as well as exact PC specs, can be found at here.

While I had the Lenovo S10 hooked up to an external monitor, I did some common tasks such as word processing, checking email, surfing the web, etc at a resolution of both 1024 x 768 and 1680 x 1050, and did not notice any significant decrease in performance.

Heat and Noise

After using the Lenovo S10 under real life usage for an hour, I used a non-contact thermometer to take temperature reading. The bottom area of the S10 ranged from 95F to 106F while the keyboard area ranged from 93F to 99F. Under most circumstances, the cooling fans remained quiet. Only occasionally, when opening a program, would the cooling fans kick in high and make a noticeable amount of noise. Even then the fans only ran on high for no more than 15 – 30 seconds. When the fans were running on high, the noise level was about the same volume as most other netbooks and laptops when their cooling fans are running on high.

Conclusion

Overall, I was rather impressed by the Lenovo S10. It was light weight, extremely portable, and offered better battery life than a full size laptop. It was also able to perform basic tasks such as word processing, browsing the internet, and checking email with ease. Often times I would grab the Lenovo S10 when heading out of the office instead of my 15.4 inch laptop due to the smaller size. There were even times when I was at home that I used the S10 instead of my regular laptop. However, these benefits came with the trade offs of limited usage since the keyboard and screen are too small for extended usage. The S10 also does not get as good of battery life as some of the other netbooks out there but I found it more than adequate for my needs.

Pros

+ Light weight
+ Build quality
+ Decent battery life
+ Comes with a 6 cell battery
+ Decent speakers
+ Easy to upgrade memory and hard drive

Cons

- Splashtop does not have a built in email client
– Battery life not quite as good as other netbooks
– White keyboard and wrist rests are hard to keep clean
– Only two USB ports

1. First ImpressionsFirst Impressions (1/2)Performance & Conclusion (2/2)View AllOn Last Page

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Tags: atom, IdeaPad, intel, Lenovo, Netbook, S10