Full Review

The Lenovo 3000 series of laptops is part of Lenovo’s value for money entertainment offering, and its pricing, performance and features makes it the final entrant of our Top 5 Budget Laptops. There's a good example of Lenovo's trademark build quality with the G530, as the laptop is pretty well built. The 15.4-inch display is glossy, which makes pictures and videos look bright and vivid, but also shows up reflections. In a pinch, you can use it to fix your hair. And that’s not much of an exaggeration.

It is powered by the Core 2 Duo T5870 2-GHz processor, 2GB RAM and storage duties are handled by a 250GB hard disk. It also comes with face-recognition feature and Lenovo's OneKey backup solution. It produced a Worldbench 6.0 score of 78, just a shade below the rest at the top. Performance on the Lenovo G530 is still good for a budget laptop, so don't worry. The touchpad just works, and the keyboard is a treat to type on, as is the case with most Lenovo laptops. But it does not have dedicated keys for navigating through documents (Page Up / Down, End, Home). However, it comes with a good set of software bundle.

The front-edge placed speakers sound good, on par with any other laptop in our Top 5, if not better. We have no particular qualms about build-quality and at 2.65-kg, it is the heaviest of the lot here. The extra weight adds up though, as battery life is pretty good. We obtained 176 minutes while running MobileMark 2007 Productivity suite. The Lenovo 3000 G530 is no doubt a good laptop, but it is outclassed by others above it. However, it stays true to core Lenovo values of a great keyboard and exceptional build quality.

Bottom Line

The Lenovo G530 rounds up our Top 5 budget laptop category. It is a touch expensive at Rs. 39,500, but definitely consider it if a good keyboard and exceptional build quality are paramount to your laptop buying decision.