Lenovo IdeaPad 1 14" 81VS009GUS Platinum Gray 2020 Review

The Lenovo IdeaPad 1 is a dirt-cheap Windows laptop that struggles with even basic tasks like web browsing or running multiple apps. Most buyers find it painfully slow, and the tiny storage fills up fast. Spend a bit more on a Chromebook or a used ThinkPad instead.

If you're searching for the absolute cheapest Windows laptop you can find, the Lenovo IdeaPad 1 81VS009GUS might pop up. It's a 14-inch machine with a 1080p screen and a price tag that hovers around $150 to $200 depending on the sale. On paper, that sounds almost too good to be true. And honestly, it mostly is. This thing is built for one job: handling a single browser tab or a Word document without bursting into flames. Even then, you'll need patience.

Inside, you're looking at an AMD A6 dual-core processor, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of eMMC storage. Those are smartphone-level specs from a few years ago, not something most people would expect from a laptop in 2024. It ships with Windows 10 in S mode, which locks you to the Microsoft Store, but you can switch out of that to install real apps like Zoom or Chrome. Just don't expect to install many of them with that tiny drive.

Lenovo mostly pitches this to students and anyone who needs a cheap second screen for email and browsing. In our database, it scores okay on compactness and reliability, but it's a disaster for performance, storage, and memory. The user sentiment score lands at the 2nd percentile. That's not a typo. Buyers have a lot to say about this one, and very little of it is good.

We ran this through our benchmarks and the results were, well, predictable. The AMD A6 sits in the 4th percentile for CPU performance among all laptops, meaning it's slower than 96% of what's out there. In practice, that means even opening the Start menu can feel like wading through molasses on a fresh boot. Multitasking is a fantasy. Opening more than two or three browser tabs brings the whole system to its knees. And that 4GB of RAM? Dead last at the 1st percentile. Windows 10 alone eats up most of that before you even start a program.

The Radeon R4 GPU lands at the 38th percentile, which is actually a small surprise given the CPU, but don't get excited. It's not a gaming chip. Solitaire and Minesweeper are fine, but anything 3D will be a slideshow. The 64GB eMMC storage (5th percentile) is painfully slow and fills up almost immediately. After Windows and a handful of apps, you're left with maybe 20GB free. The 14-inch 1080p screen is one of the few bright spots visually, but it's still well below average in quality and brightness, scoring in the 21st percentile.

The price is the only real reason to consider this laptop. It's often listed for as little as $153, which is cheaper than a lot of Chromebooks. But even at that rock-bottom price, you have to ask whether a laptop that struggles to do its one job is actually a good deal. For a little more money, you can grab a used business laptop or a Chromebook with a faster processor and actual RAM. If you do buy this, make sure you get the lowest price you can—$150 or less—because any more than that is just lighting money on fire.

We have to compare this to machines that actually exist in the same budget universe. The ASUS Vivobook X1407QA-V14.X116512 often scrapes the same price bracket and usually packs an Intel Celeron or Pentium chip that runs circles around this AMD A6. Chromebooks like the Lenovo Flex 3 or Acer Chromebook 314 cost about the same and offer a far smoother experience for light tasks, though they're limited to Chrome OS. Even a refurbished ThinkPad T480 from a few years back will give you an actual quad-core chip, upgradable RAM, and a proper SSD for about the same money.

Apple's MacBook Air and the Acer Predator Helios are mentioned in our database as competitors somehow, but that's just pricing data gone wild. Nobody cross-shops a $200 laptop with a $1,000+ machine. The real fight is at the bottom of the barrel, and in that fight, this IdeaPad 1 usually loses.

Skip this laptop entirely if you plan to do anything beyond reading static web pages or typing a single document at a time. Students juggling Zoom calls, Google Docs, and research tabs will hate it. Developers, even beginners, will find the CPU and RAM laughably inadequate. Gamers, forget it. If your budget is this tight, a Chromebook or a used ThinkPad will serve you far better without the daily headaches.

I can't recommend the Lenovo IdeaPad 1 81VS009GUS for anyone except maybe a child who only needs to type up a book report and will never open more than one tab. Even then, the Windows S mode restrictions and the constant slowdowns will test your patience. The overwhelming customer feedback says the same thing: it's too slow out of the box, and things only get worse.

If your budget is absolutely locked under $200 and you must have Windows, this is one of the only options, and you can make it work if you're a masochist. For everyone else, save up another fifty bucks or buy used. The frustration isn't worth the small amount of cash you'll save.