Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 11 review

While netbooks are a cheap way to get a laptop you can carry everywhere with you, they suffer from poor performance and screen sizes. If you need a faster computer on a tight budget the Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 11 could be the model that you’re looking for.

Despite its low cost this well-built 11.6in laptop has a Core i3-380UM processor. This 1.33GHz model is the ultra-low voltage model designed to fit into tiny laptops without generating much heat. The result is that the ThinkPad Edge 11 weighs just 1.5kg, so you can throw it in a bag and carry it everywhere you go.

With such a low clock speed this laptop can’t hope to compete with models that use the regular mobile Core i3 chips. That said, a score of 50 overall in our benchmarks shows that the ThinkPad edge is around twice the speed of a dual-core netbook. It certainly feels responsive in Windows, as the Core i3-380UM has two real cores and two virtual cores thanks to Hyper-Threading.

One minor disappointment is that there’s only 2GB of RAM installed, where as we’d have liked to see 4GB, especially as the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Professional is installed. Fortunately, there’s a free memory slot so that you can upgrade the laptop yourself. A 320GB hard disk is good to see at this price and, even with the restore partition taking up space, gives you plenty of room for all of your documents.

While the base of the laptop warms up with use, it’s never uncomfortably hot and certainly an improvement over the similar AMD-based Lenovo ThinkPad x100e. Battery life is excellent thanks to the low-power CPU, with the ThinkPad Edge lasting just over seven ours in our light use test.