Lenovo Ideapad 100S: A workhorse laptop for the budget-minded

Do we have a new king of the ultra-budget laptop? Well, almost. I'm Dan Ackerman, and this is the Lenovo IdeaPad 100S. It is a newer entry in this growing field of computers that cost basically less than $200 and yet are still fairly functional, fairly usable for everyday tasks. We've got things like the HP screen 11 which is about $200, the clamshell 11 laptop, much like this, runs Windows 10. You've got inexpensive things like the Intel compute stick. That's basically like a full mini desktop PC the size of a big USB. Key, that's only a little bit more than $100. And now we have the Lenovo Ideapad 100S, for $199. It comes in a variety of fun colors, which is nice, including this muted red right here. There's also blue, silver, and white. And it's got an Intel Atom processor, as you would expect in something of this price range, along with two gigs of RAM. And a very small Amount of storage, 32 gigs of solid-state storage, but that's pretty much what you get in this category along with a low res non-touch 1366 by 768 display. The reason the Lenovo stands out as one of the better examples of this genre is because it's got a typically excellent Lenovo keyboard on it. Island style keys, but like other Lenovo systems they curve out just a little bit at the bottom, giving something for your finger to catch on to. Really the best keyboard I've seen in one of these ultra budget systems. Unfortunately the flip side to that is that the touch pad is a huge source of frustration and might be a deal breaker for you if you're looking at the system because It's not a click pad style pad. It's an older style that has separate left and right mouse buttons. And it also does not support multi-touch gestures. So you can't do two fingers growing when you're going up and down long webpages, or tap to fingers down to get a right click. Especially without a touchscreen, that's very important to have if you are reading an article or scrolling through your Facebook feed and not having it Hugely, hugely frustrating. It could very easily cause you to put aside this system and get something else like the HP version instead, even though the design, and chassis, and keyboard are much better here. But any way you slice it, you are getting something It will work for, you know, everyday tasks. Web surfing, online shopping, social media. For less than two hundred dollars it's something that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. I'm Dan Ackerman and that is the Lenovo Ideapad One Hundred S.