Lenovo IdeaPad U310: A More Affordable Ultrabook

Battery performance is important for laptops in general, but particularly for the ultrabook category. You buy the ultrabook for its portability – and portability means more than being light and easy to carry. It also means not needing to be tethered to a power outlet. If an ultrabook can't give you more than two hours of work time, it may hamper your productivity. We have two battery-draining tests that will give you an idea of what your workday with the Lenovo IdeaPad U310 might look like.

Battery Eater Pro Stress Test and Web Browsing Light Duty Test Light and Heavy Duty Workloads

The first battery test we ran is the hardest on the system. Battery Eater Pro runs tasks constantly to provide a heavy workload for the computer's CPU, GPU, memory, and storage drive. It starts as soon as you unplug the ultrabook and runs the battery down until it's completely exhausted. Then, when you restart the computer, it delivers the results of the test. It's a good way to see what your ultrabook can do under heavy use when it's off the power cord. The other battery test is a light-duty Web Browsing test that refreshes every three minutes. This shows you what the ultrabook could do if you were to surf the Web without running other applications. To prep the U310 for the these tests, we set the display brightness to 50% and disabled sleep timers.

As you can see, the U310 has strong battery life, even under heavy workloads. At 148 minutes (nearly 2.5 hours), the U310 lasts quite a bit longer than its predecessor. It also handles light-duty work as well, which makes it a good companion for a long flight.  Here, you'll get almost 7 hours of use on a single charge. Keep in mind that the system has performance settings that we don't touch, which means you're almost certain to see slightly better battery life in real-world use, especially if you tweak a little.