Lenovo Essential G570

Full Review

The 15.6-inch Lenovo Essential G570 laptop is aimed at the budget minded consumer, and was launched in India at the same time as the Lenovo IdeaPad Z570.


Design

The Lenovo G570 looks good and its black colouring gives the laptop a very 'professional' aura. The back lid has a shiny dark appearance, and has the Lenovo logo displayed on its top left portion.  A dark bezel borders the 15.6-inch LED backlit screen and the palm rest has a black metallic finish. The touchpad is located below the keyboard and is positioned towards the left end. While the chassis felt solid, the hinges on which the screen rested seemed rather flimsy. I might be nit-picking here, but the screen did seem to wobble a bit.

The laptop features a full keyboard with a separate number pad. The G570 weighs 2.6-kg with a six-cell battery and comes with a one year warranty.


Features
The Lenovo G570 provides a bright 15.6-inch glossy screen that supports a screen resolution of 1366x768 pixels. The viewing angles though do get poor, especially when looking at the screen from the extreme angles (left, right, top, bottom) - the colour shifts and there is a certain darkish hue to all the images/videos. Otherwise, the screen is good for both reading text and viewing images/videos. There's a 2.0-megapixel (MP) webcam placed at the top of the laptop's screen bezel.

The keyboard has a chiclet style configuration - one that proves to be comfortable for typing.  The chiclet keys curve at the bottom and are well spaced. For general purposes, the subtly-granulated touchpad's response was excellent.  

The power button is located at the top right of the keyboard, alongside the one key recovery button. The speakers are located at the front base of the laptop's chassis.


Hardware
The Lenovo Essential G570 comes with an expected configuration for its asking price. It features a Intel second generation 2.10 Ghz Intel Core i3-2310M (Sandy Bridge) processor, 3GB DDR3 RAM, on-board Intel HD3000 graphics and a 640GB hard drive. 

The laptop has four USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet port, VGA port, HDMI, headphone and mic ports, and a memory card reader. The Lenovo Essential G570 also has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1 wireless connectivity. The Lenovo G570 doesn't have Gigabit Ethernet - it only has the 100Mbit Wired Ethernet. There is also a handy switch for enabling/disabling wireless network connectivity. The laptop comes pre-installed with Windows 7 Home Basic, so you will be missing out on features such as Aero theme and Windows Media Center.

More details can be seen on this review's "Specifications" page.


Software:
The Lenovo G570 comes bundled with its set of proprietary software. Included in this set was the biometric face recognition tool (VeriFace 4.0), which is a handy utility for securely logging into your system. It doubles up as an extra security feature when your system login is already password protected.

OneKey recovery, which is also part of Lenovo’s software set on the G570 laptop, allows you to backup and recover all the relevant data.

Then there's the CyberLink YouCam, a tool that lets you do a whole lot of fun things with the Essential G570's 2.0MP webcam.

The Lenovo EE Boot optimizer, as the name implies, allows you to optimize your systems boot time. Lenovo recorded the boot time at 58 seconds. After the optimization, the system recorded a boot time of around 49 seconds.

The DirectShare feature allows you to connect with other laptops to share files and folders - as long as all the concerned systems are within the same network and all of them have the DrectShare software installed in them.


Performance
The Lenovo G570 managed a score of 88 on the WorldBench 6 test, a score which is good for a mainstream budget laptop. The WorldBench score reflects what the laptop can do - manage your day to day multitasking needs of surfing the Web, watching movies, and working on productivity tools.



During synthetic testing, the laptop's hard disk recorded an average read speed of 66.9 MB/s. The Lenovo Essential G570 recorded a PC Mark Vantage score of 5824.

The G570 features a graphics core integrated into the Intel SandyBridge processor. As such gaming is not what you are looking for when opting to buy this laptop. For instance when running Far Cry 2, the laptop recorded an average FPS of 14.27 when run in DX10 mode at 1024x768, 2xAA and minimum effects.

Watching 720p and 1080p videos on the display is comfortable. The sound output from the audio system is clear and loud enough for a small room. It is apt for personal entertainment.

Throughout our testing, the Lenovo G570 did a good job of keeping itself cool. However, you do notice that the lower left centre part of the laptop heats up slightly. Moreover, the laptop was barely audible during operation, which is good.

The laptop's six-cell battery lasted for 1 hour 30 minutes through one of our battery tests, at high performance mode. Having said that, you should be able to extract around 4 plus hours out of the laptop's battery for doing lighter every-day work such as browsing the web and listening to music.


Upgradability
The design of the Lenovo G570 is conducive to memory and storage upgrades. Once you remove the laptop's back cover, you find the position of the two memory slots and the hard disk to be accessible.

Bottom Line

The 4 USB ports and the higher capacity HDD make this laptop stand out. Lenovo's software set is always a welcome addition on the software side of things. It is easy to carry and will suit folks who are always on the move. The laptop has features expected of a budget laptop and similarly delivers performance expected of such a class of laptops.

While others mainstream laptops, such as Acer's, might come relatively cheaper, there are lot of other aspects to consider here, such as build quality, brand name and other such related factors. If you do want to get the laptop at a cheaper rate, there are other Lenovo models within the Essential series that come pre-installed with DOS OS, with the rest of the configuration staying almost the same. If you are in the market for a budget laptop, then the Lenovo Essential G570 is one such product that you should look at.