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I recently purchased an IdeaPad Y450 and did a battery life test to see how accurate Lenovo's claims are. I have the 418938U model, which is the highest end model that has integrated graphics instead of discrete (4 GB RAM, 320 GB hard drive). According to a PDF on the Lenovo website ( http://shop.lenovo.com/ISS_Static/WW/AG/merchandising/US/PDFs/yseries_techspecs_062509.pdf), the Y450s with integrated graphics should get up to 4.5 hours of battery life. The battery life for the highest end model is listed at up to 3.5 hours, presumably lower because of the discrete graphics card and Bluetooth.
I fully charged up my Y450 and then unplugged it, already booted up, to test the battery life. I was not using any of the ports, and did not use the optical drive. The power plan was set to "Power saver", as that should give the longest battery life of the three available options. The three options are Power saver, Balanced, and High performance.
After four hours unplugged, the battery had gone down to 20% remaining. The four hours was spent web surfing and instant messaging; no gaming or anything too intense. At four hours I needed to pull myself away from a computer, so I didn't continue the test until the battery was depleted. However, assuming the 20% figure was accurate, the battery would have easily made it to 4.5 hours before automatically going into hibernate mode (which it does when the battery hits 5%). So Lenovo's claim of 4.5 hours is certainly accurate, at least for my machine.
Regarding the heat of the Y450, which has been a much discussed topic: yes, it's warm. No, it's not too hot to use. I was on it for four hours straight, and while the area to the right of the trackpad (where my wrist rests) does get warm, it was never too hot to touch. I didn't even feel as though it was uncomfortable. Although my wrist did get kinda sticky; not full-out sweaty, but just a sort of sticky feeling that's noticeable when you lift your wrist off of the laptop. I've also noticed that, as expected, heat is much less of a problem when the laptop is sitting on a desk or table than when it is sitting in your lap. All in all, this is one of the warmer laptops I've used, but it's not at the point of causing discomfort. My two cents, anyway.
Other Y450 observations: The textured trackpad is a nice touch, very easy to use. There is a little bit of keyboard flex on the right side, most noticeable under the right Shift key. I don't feel the flexing every time I hit that key or other keys on that side of the keyboard, and it's not significant enough to worry me. The LED's are all useful and look good. Overall design of the laptop is very nice. Speakers sound great, or at least sound great for laptop speakers. Screen brightness is particularly good in High Performance mode. Everything seems to work well.
IdeaPad Y450 Battery Life, Heat, and Observations
Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by fudd30, Jul 22, 2009.
