Best Lenovo Laptop for 2024

Lenovo sells a wide variety of laptops, and many models are available in multiple configurations to meet your performance and budget needs. If you need help finding the right Lenovo laptop, we can help. Here are the most important considerations to keep in mind when shopping for a new laptop.

Price

For most people, the search for a new laptop starts with the price. If the statistics that chip maker Intel and PC manufacturers throw at us are correct, you will hold onto your next laptop for at least three years. If you can afford to stretch your budget a bit to get better specs, do so. That applies whether you spend $500 or more than $1,000. In the past, you could get away with spending less upfront with an eye to upgrading memory and storage in the future. Laptop manufacturers are moving away from assuming that components can be easily upgraded, so again, it’s best to get as many laptop options as you can afford from the start.

In general, the more you spend, the better the laptop. That could mean better components for faster performance, a nicer screen, sturdier build quality, a smaller or lighter design made from more expensive materials, or even a more comfortable keyboard. All these things increase the cost of a laptop. I’d like to say that $500 gets you a powerful gaming laptop, for example, but that’s not the case. Right now, the sweet spot for a reliable laptop that can handle average work, home office, or school tasks is between $700 and $800, with a reasonable model for creative work or gaming costing more than $1,000. The key is to look for discounts on models in all price ranges so you can get more laptop options for less money. Like other vendors, Lenovo is constantly rotating laptop sales on its site.

Mate

If you take your laptop to school, work, or just to your local coffee shop most mornings, you’ll need a smaller and lighter laptop; something with a 13-inch or 14-inch screen. If you’re buying a laptop for home or work and don’t plan to travel a lot with it, you might want to consider getting a larger 15-inch, 16-inch, or even 17-inch screen. That gives you more space to work, play and multitask.

Display

When choosing a display, there are many considerations: how much to display (which surprisingly has more to do with resolution than screen size), what types of content you’ll be watching, and whether you’ll be using it for gaming or entertainment. to game. creative endeavors.

You really want to optimize the pixel density; that is, the number of pixels per inch the screen can display. While there are other factors that contribute to sharpness, higher pixel density usually means sharper rendering of text and interface elements. (You can easily calculate the pixel density of any screen at DPI calculator if you don’t feel like doing the math, and you can also find out what math to do there.) As a rule of thumb, we recommend a dot spacing of at least 100 pixels per inch.

Because of the way Windows can scale the screen, you’re often better off with a higher resolution than you might think. You can always make things bigger on a high-resolution screen, but you can never make them smaller (to fit more content into the display) on a low-resolution screen. This is why a 4K, 14-inch screen may sound like unnecessary overkill, but it might not be when you need to view a wide spreadsheet, for example.

Text and the edges of images may look blurry on a lower resolution screen. At a minimum, look for a Full HD resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels – or a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 pixels on 16:10 aspect ratio laptops that are larger than traditional 16:9 widescreen displays and offer more vertical screen real estate for work without the footprint significantly. A Quad HD (QHD) resolution of 2,560 x 1,440 pixels (2,560 x 1,600 on a 16:10 display) results in sharper text and images and will likely suffice on a 13- or 14-inch laptop screen. You don’t necessarily need a 4K screen.

Processor

The processor, also called the CPU, is the brain of a laptop. Intel and AMD are the main CPU makers for Windows laptops, with Qualcomm a new third option with its Arm-based Snapdragon X processors. Both Intel and AMD offer a dizzying selection of mobile processors. What makes things even trickier is that both manufacturers have chips designed for different laptop styles, such as power-saving chips for ultraportables or faster processors for gaming laptops. Their naming conventions let you know which type is used. You can go to Intels or AMDs sites for explanations so you get the performance you want. In general, the higher the processor speed and the more cores it has, the better the performance will be.

Battery life has less to do with core count and more to do with CPU architecture, Arm versus x86. Apple’s Arm-based MacBooks and the first Arm-based Copilot Plus PCs we tested offer better battery life than laptops based on x86 processors from Intel and AMD.

Graphic

The graphics processor does all the work of driving the screen and generating what’s displayed, as well as speeding up many graphics (and increasingly AI-related) operations. For Windows laptops, there are two types of GPUs: integrated (iGPU) or discrete (dGPU). As the names imply, an iGPU is part of the CPU package, while a dGPU is a separate chip with dedicated memory (VRAM) that it communicates with directly, making it faster than sharing memory with the CPU.

Because the iGPU shares space, memory, and power with the CPU, it is limited by its limits. It allows for smaller, lighter laptops, but doesn’t perform nearly as well as a dGPU. There are some games and creative software that won’t work unless they detect a dGPU or enough VRAM. Most productivity software, video streaming, web browsing, and other non-specialized apps work fine on an iGPU.

For more power-hungry graphics needs, such as video editing, STEM and design applications, and gaming, you’ll need a dGPU; there are only two real companies that make them, Nvidia and AMD, with Intel offering some based on the Xe-branded iGPU technology (or the older UHD Graphics branding) in its CPUs.

Memory

For memory, we recommend 16 GB of RAM, with 8 GB being the absolute minimum. RAM is where the operating system stores all the data for currently running applications, and it can fill up quickly. Then it starts switching between RAM and SSD, which is slower. Many laptops under $500 have 4GB or 8GB, which, combined with a slower drive, can make for a frustratingly slow Windows laptop experience. Additionally, many laptops now have the memory soldered to the motherboard. Most manufacturers disclose this, but if the RAM type is LPDDR, assume it is soldered and not upgradeable.

Some PC manufacturers solder the memory on and leave an empty internal slot for adding RAM. You may need to contact the laptop manufacturer or check the laptop’s full specifications online to confirm this. Check the Internet for user experiences, as the lock may still be difficult to reach, may require non-standard or hard-to-obtain memory, or other pitfalls including voiding the warranty.

Storage

You’ll still find cheaper hard drives in budget laptops and larger hard drives in gaming laptops, but faster solid-state drives have all but replaced hard drives in laptops. They can make a big difference in performance. Not all SSDs are equally fast, and cheaper laptops tend to have slower drives. If the laptop only has 8 GB of RAM, it may switch to that drive and the system will quickly slow down while you work.

Get what you can afford, and if you need a smaller drive, you can always add an external drive or two, or use cloud storage to boost a small internal drive. The only exception is gaming laptops: we don’t recommend going with anything less than a 512GB SSD unless you really like deleting games every time you want to play a new game.