Review: Lenovo ThinkPad SL500

In the past few months, Lenovo has experimented to tremble up its merchandise accessibility a bit with the preamble of new-fangled lines of laptops. The SL series is a finances line of notebooks intended at the small business section.

Design

The 15.4-inch SL500 is a bigger adaptation, obviously, than the 13.3-inch SL300 or 14.1-inch SL400 that we've reviewed at previously. It trails the identical stylings, with a lustrous back lid and narrow piece underneath the LCD, while all over the place else is encrusted in a black matte plastic. Positioned in the corners of the slick back are the different Lenovo, ThinkPad and Energy Star logos.


Specifications

· Memory: 2GB PC2-5300 RAM
· storage space: 320GB SATA hard drive
· Optical Drive: DVD+/-RW
· Wireless Connectivity: Intel 5100 802.11 a/b/g/n
· Graphics Accelerator: NVIDIA Geforce 9300M GS 256MB


Performance

The SL500 is a commerce laptop, so don't be expecting disproportionate 3D/gaming presentation. That being alleged, it detained its own extremely well. Recital was satisfactory with even desktop rendering. The laptop never felt bogged down even with quite a few applications open at similar time appreciation to the dual-core Intel processor buried inside. Lenovo's laptop keyboards are branded for their constancy and effortlessness of typing, and the keyboard on this notebook is no omission.

Being a 15.4" laptop provides the SL500 the suppleness to proffer a number of dissimilar ports and extension technologies, and the SL500 takes benefit of the room. Lenovo also elegantly speckled the ports around the sides of the laptop rather than putting them all in the flipside, so users don't have to twist the laptop around anytime they desire to plug something in.
Lenovo did an unbelievable job when engineering the SL500's temperature dissipation techniques. Our laptop came with a 9-cell battery, which is a supplementary $79 but except your laptop stays plugged in all day, I'd say it's a requirement. For the battery test, I set the display to sixty percent vividness, wireless networking on, and loading different webpage’s every so frequently.


Overall

At the end of the day, the SL500 is a commendable accumulation to the ThinkPad line, as it permits consumers to forgo a definite degree of build excellence while saving adequate money to approximately buy a second computer. Small businesses glancing to swell their productivity while keeping prices down would do well to seem at the ThinkPad SL500 as a mobile elucidation.


Pros

+ Assortment of ports, together with FireWire and HDMI
+ Bodily wireless connectivity button for easy conformity with flight regulations
+ Far-fetched heat debauchery
+ Contemporary business plan
+ ThinkPad excellence devoid of ThinkPad prices!


Cons

- Intend makes accessing a few ports tricky
- Lustrous lid is a fingerprint attraction


Value For Money

Our Rating