Review: Lenovo B40-30

Introduction and performance

As surprising as it sounds, Lenovo sells two products that carry the B40 name. One is an all-in-one PC and the other a business laptop, and we are reviewing the latter today. Its bigger brother, the B50-30, was put to the test by techradar more than a year ago and both share some common DNA, as expected. Both belong to Lenovo's B-Series, a line of affordable laptops that target the booming small business segment.

This laptop was provided by Ebuyer and cost £179 (around $275, or AU$385) but you can get it for under £170 should you shop around. (Ed: Note that Ebuyer no longer sells this laptop).

Design

There are three big differences between these two Lenovo laptops though, and the first is the form factor. The B40 (MCG27UK) has a 14-inch display compared to a 15.3-inch for its bigger brother. That translates into slightly better portability (0.17Kg lighter) and a marginally smaller frame (40mm narrower).

Then there's the fact that this laptop doesn't come with an optical drive by default, the opposite of the rest of the range. We believe this is more of a cost cutting exercise since there is still an empty bay where the drive ought to be and Lenovo does provide an option to add one.

The third difference and probably a deal breaker for some of its targeted customers is the fact that it doesn't have a numeric keypad because of the form factor. Ouch.

That's a shame. The laptop looks anything but basic or entry level; true, it is plastic but it's matte and sturdy. This thing doesn't flex and the slightly reflective exterior adorned by the (old) Lenovo logo shouts "I mean business" to us.

The keyboard is ordinary: six rows, non-dedicated function keys (boo!) but a dedicated menu button. The keys, with Lenovo's signature curved base, feel slightly soft (and quiet) and have a decent travel. Nothing to write home about (or indeed type home about).

As for the trackpad, it's a tad bigger than a credit card with two physical buttons located at the bottom of it. They've got surprisingly shallow travel and you need to press them bang in the middle to get adequate feedback (i.e. hear a perceptible click).

Specification

This is a value, entry-level laptop and as such, some level of corner cutting had to be expected. But Lenovo opted for a big one – the laptop comes with just 2GB of RAM, half that of the B50, a notebook which doesn't cost much more.

With even a £100 smartphone offering the same amount of memory, it's puzzling as to why bean counters at the Chinese PC maker chose to save a few quid but ended up crippling the laptop.

What makes it even worse is that this memory is shared with the graphics sub-system which could account for anywhere between 5% and 50% of the total system memory.

As with many sub-£200 laptops, the B40-30 is powered by the ubiquitous Intel Celeron N2840, a dual-core Bay Trail processor that has two cores, with a base clock speed of 2.16GHz, 1MB of cache and on-board Intel HD graphics.

Don't expect to use this processor for any taxing tasks – mainstream games are a no-no unless you enjoy watching slideshows, as that's exactly what games will look like if you try to run them (assuming that you manage to install them in the first place).

The rest of the hardware consists of a 500GB hard disk drive, Bluetooth 4.0, 802.11n Wi-Fi, a Gigabit Ethernet port, one USB 3.0 port, two USB 2.0 ports, VGA, HDMI and an audio socket. The card reader is at the front and you can upgrade the system memory by adding a second memory stick.

Switching on the laptop reveals a couple of other corners which have been cut. The display is average at best – the million or so pixels that are spread over the 14-inch diagonal screen should have been brighter. Colours appear to be washed out which leads us to believe that the display panel hasn't been fine-tuned properly or is simply not good enough.

When it comes to audio, listening to the on-board speakers reminded us that we were dealing with an entry-level product, as they're barely better than what comes out of cheap Bluetooth speakers. At least the engineers had the bright idea of locating the speakers between the laptop base and the display base, directly facing the user.

Other than that the laptop ships with a myriad of applications, from Lenovo itself and from other third parties. Password Manager, Microsoft Office 2013, PowerDVD 10, Cyberlink Power2Go, Absolute Data Protect, Share it, McAfee LiveSafe and even Maxthon, a popular web browser in Asia.

A number of these load when Windows starts, substantially eating into the amount of free system memory you've got to play with.

Performance

The laptop was updated to Windows 10 from Windows 8.1 but that didn't do anything to improve its poor performance. The B40 delivered some of the lowest scores we've seen on a laptop, and you can blame the processor and the meagre amount of RAM for that.

Credit where credit is due though – this machine did manage to complete all the benchmarks unlike some of its competitors in the past. But still, scores of 469, 1210 and 136 points on 3DMark's Ice Storm, Cloud Gate and Fire Strike tests respectively are not something to be proud of.

Ditto for the abysmal 48 points and 6.12fps on Cinebench 15 as well as the PCMark 8 scores (1218 on Home, 928 on Work and 1642 on Creative). The battery life was probably the only highlight with the laptop reaching a respectable 4 hours and 21 minutes when put through the PCMark 8 battery benchmark.

Verdict

Lenovo savaged this laptop by offering 2GB of RAM rather than the usual 4GB. As a result, the performance hit is significant and makes this machine barely usable even under the lightest workloads.

We liked

The form factor is perfect if you feel that netbooks are too small and don't care about a numeric keypad. The hard drive is also surprisingly large, which is good to see. The keyboard is also pretty good and responsive, not something we were expecting on such a cheap laptop.

We disliked

The lack of memory is the biggest issue and fortunately, it is not something that cannot be remedied. Stick some more RAM in and you shall be happy! The credit card-sized trackpad would befit a tiny netbook more than a laptop of this size, and it's a big let-down even on a device in this price bracket.

Final verdict

As it stands, it is hard to recommend the B40 over the likes of the B50 or other competing sub-£200 notebooks. 2GB is simply not enough when your rivals offer twice as much memory.

The good news though is that you can upgrade the memory cheaply (4GB will only set you back around £15) but you will need to choose wisely and know what you're doing. Upgrading the memory shouldn't take more than 10 minutes and you could end up with a 6GB laptop costing well under £200. Not bad at all.

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