Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch: Affordable, Touch-Enabled

Name: Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch: Affordable, Touch-Enabled Windows 8 Notebook
Brand: Lenovo

by Joshua Gulick — Monday, April 15, 2013, 12:00 PM EDT

Battery life is always a big deal for a laptop, but it’s a little less important in a mid-range laptop that’s probably going to be spending most of its life near a power outlet. The Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch is equipped with a 4-Cell Li-Ion, 48Whr battery that will get you through short excursions. Don’t count on it for all-day conferences, though. The adapter is very small and never got hot during our testing – in fact, it never seemed to get hotter than room temperature.

Battery Eater Pro

Battery Life Testing

We put the Z400 Touch through two tests. Battery Eater Pro is designed to tax a laptop’s resources to shed some light on how long the laptop’s battery can stand up to heavy use. Our web browsing test, on the other hand, is very light duty: we direct the browser to a page that has typical web page elements and refresh the page regularly until the battery slowly grinds to a halt.

Battery Eater really punished the Z400 Touch, making the system cry “Uncle” in only 93 minutes. But the laptop redeemed itself when faced with the web browsing test, putting up a strong 6.5 hours of surfing. That’s good news for anyone looking at the Z400 Touch as an everyday laptop, but it won't last as long unthethered as machines that include larger, higher-capacity batteries.

Tags: Lenovo, IdeaPad, laptop, Core i5, touch, Ivy Bridge, Intel HD 4000, z400

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.