Download Dolby Audio Driver for Lenovo Ideapad 330

If you lot’re on a tight upkeep and need a
laptop
for basic online tasks, then the Lenovo IdeaPad 330 (reviewed at $265) is a solid pick. This xv.6-inch automobile has a sturdy chassis and a comfortable keyboard, perks that budget laptops rarely offer. The IdeaPad 330 even has a
DVD bulldoze, which isn’t something we typically run into on laptops anymore. Unfortunately, a poor display, brusk battery life, and beneath-average operation spoil the fun, so nosotros recommend spending a bit more on a better system, similar the
Acer Aspire Due east 15. It’s still ane of the
best laptops under $300
you’ll notice.

Lenovo IdeaPad 330 Price and Configuration Options

The IdeaPad 330 is sold in various configurations at a wide range of prices. We tested a $265 budget model with a 15.half dozen-inch, 1366 ten 768-pixel display, an Intel Celeron N4100 CPU, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB, 5,400-rpm hard drive.

A more
premium IdeaPad 330
with a Core i3-8130U CPU is bachelor for $299, and in that location is too an
AMD version
(opens in new tab)

with a Ryzen 5 2500U CPU, 12GB of RAM, and a 2TB HDD for $663.

Design

The IdeaPad 330 looks like an ordinary laptop. By that, I mean that if I asked you lot to draw a laptop, you’d probably land on something that looked a lot similar the IdeaPad 330. Information technology’due south a rectangle with rounded corners, and has a silverish chapeau with a Chrome logo in ane corner. The IdeaPad’s chassis isn’t thick, nor thin, and the laptop’s silver lid and nighttime-greyness undercarriage are fabricated of hard plastic.

The inside of the laptop is simply as uninspired. Thick bezels that frame a low-resolution display remind me of my dad’south embarrassing
GI spectacles
(or known in the armed services every bit “BCGs,” or birth command spectacles). On a positive note, the brushed-metal finish on the deck could easily be mistaken for aluminum, and the dark-gray keyboard keys contrast nicely against the surface.

In short, the IdeaPad 330’s design serves its office as a laptop quite well, but without doing anything original. But that’s OK. We’re so used to seeing flimsy notebooks in this cost range that i that feels as sturdy as the IdeaPad 330 is a breath of fresh air. Yep, the IdeaPad 330 feels like a solid machine – non
ThinkPad X1 Carbon
premium – but above-average for the price.

More:
Best 2-in-one Laptops – Laptop/Tablet Hybrids – Laptop Magazine

The IdeaPad 330 isn’t a ii-in-1 laptop and doesn’t have a touch screen, only its flexible hinge rotates 180 degrees and then that yous can bear witness the screen to people around you or adjust the bending of the display when using it on your lap while y’all relax on the couch.

At 14.9 ten ten.2 10 0.nine inches and 4.iv pounds, the IdeaPad 330 is smaller and lighter than the
Acer Aspire E xv
(15 ten x.two x i.2 inches, 5 pounds), and about the same size as the
Dell Inspiron 15 3000
(xiv.9 ten 10.2 x 0.viii inches, 5 pounds). Unsurprisingly, the 14-inch
Acer Swift 1
(12.7 ten 0 x 0.half dozen inches, 2.9 pounds) is a lot more portable than the IdeaPad.

Ports

The 330 has all the ports you could enquire for – if information technology were 2012. Simply seriously, the right side of the laptop is taken up by a DVD bulldoze. Yes, the CD drive lives on.

On the opposite side of the IdeaPad 330 is where you’ll find all the ports, including a USB 3.1 port, a USB 2.0 input, an HDMI, an RJ45 Ethernet port and a headphone/mic combo jack.

At that place’south also a 4-in-1 card reader so you can upload photos from an SD card without a dongle.

Display

It’s hard to criticize such an cheap laptop for having a low-resolution display. At the same time, some other $100 will get you a laptop with a 1080p panel, which volition provide a much sharper epitome than the IdeaPad 330’southward xv.6-inch, 1366 x 768 display.

Despite the low pixel count, I could run across individual drops of h2o beading on Sylvester Stallone’south face up after he splashed himself with water in the trailer for Rocky V. But a close look revealed lots of graininess, peculiarly during darker scenes. I was more bothered by the display’s dull colors and poor viewing angles, both of which made this over-the-top action sequel look washed out.

Our lab result reaffirmed some of those shortcomings. According to our colorimeter, the IdeaPad 330’s display covers just 66% of the sRGB color gamut. While that tops the Aspire E 15 (62%) and matches the Swift 1, the IdeaPad 330’s screen is less colorful than that of the average upkeep laptops (83%) and the Inspiron 15 3000 (73%).

The IdeaPad 330’s display is fairly dim, but its matte terminate improves viewability in bright rooms. With a peak brightness of 188 nits, the display is dimmer than those on the Aspire E fifteen (227 nits), Swift 1 (218 nits) and the boilerplate upkeep laptop (208 nits). The Inspiron 15 3000 measured an average of 170 nits.

Keyboard and Touchpad

Lenovo always seems to deliver with its keyboards, and the IdeaPad 330 doesn’t break that trend.

While information technology’s not ThinkPad proficient, I really enjoyed typing on the IdeaPad 330’s keyboard. The subtly curved chicklet-mode keys are nicely sized and adequately clicky. In that location’southward a pleasant weightiness to the keys, likely a upshot of their 70 grams of actuation force. The keys travel 1.four millimeters, which is short of our ane.five-mm preference, just notwithstanding better than the keyboards on competing devices. I do wish there was backlighting, just that’s non all the same a standard feature on upkeep laptops.

I typed at a rate of 114 words per infinitesimal with an accuracy of 95% on the 10fastfingers.com typing test. That effect is a tad slower than my 119 wpm speed average, only matches my typical accurateness.

More:The 22 All-time Keyboard Shortcuts for Your Windows Laptop

The iv.i x ii.vi-inch touchpad on the IdeaPad 330 is fairly responsive, and I didn’t accept any problems executing Windows 10 gestures, like pinch-to-zoom and 3-finger swipe to switch windows.

Functioning and Graphics

There was no demand to run my typical workload on the IdeaPad 330 (Intel Celeron N4100, 4GB of RAM) to detect that its performance is only acceptable for bones tasks, similar sending emails or browsing the web.

It took nearly a minute to load Laptopmag.com with only 4 other Google Chrome tabs pulled up. If any other tabs were open up, the IdeaPad 330 slowed to a halt. Fortunately, once a webpage finished rendering, I could flip through unlike pages with “merely” a few seconds delays. And although I had to wait several moments for it to load, a 1080p YouTube video virtually
Google’s Stadia
gaming service never buffered.

The IdeaPad 330 landed in the middle of the pack for budget laptops on our operation benchmarks. With a score of 5,234 on the Geekbench 4.ane test, the Lenovo just edged out the budget category average (5,184), but couldn’t keep upwards with the Swift 1 (Pentium Silver N5000, 5,527) or the Aspire E 15 (Core i3-8130U, 7,871).

More:
Laptops with the Best Productivity Performance

The lackluster real-world performance I experienced on the IdeaPad 330 stemmed from its sluggish hard drive. The IdeaPad 330’s 500GB, 5,400-rpm HDD needed 2 minutes and 57 seconds to duplicate 4.97GB of mixed-media files, at a rate of 28.8 megabytes per second. Just the Inspiron 15 3000 (500GB, 5,400-rpm HDD, 25.7MBps) was slower, while the Swift 1 (64GB eMMC, 65 MBps), Aspire E 15 (1TB, 5400-rpm SATA hard drive, 33.5MBps), and the boilerplate upkeep laptop (65MBps) take speedier storage.

The IdeaPad 330 really suffered on the HandBrake test, taking 1 hour and 7 seconds to transcode a 4K video into 1080p resolution. Other budget laptops completed the chore in nearly half that time, including the Aspire E fifteen (31:40) and Swift i (46:13), while the budget laptop average is even faster, at 21:27.

MORE:Hybrid Laptop Buying Guide: How to Buy a 2-in-1 Model

If you desire to game on the IdeaPad 330, you’re pretty much limited to games in the Windows App Store. The device played the racing game Dirt three at 14 frames per 2nd, which is nowhere about our 30-fps playability threshold. For comparison, the Aspire E 15 (UHD Graphics 620) ran the game at 56 fps; the budget category average is 28 fps.

We saw like results on the Ice Storm Unlimited graphics examination, in which the 330 scored a 25,837, well below what the Aspire E 15 (63,817) and Swift 1 (UHD 605, 32,238) netted.

Bombardment Life

Stay near an outlet if you plan on using the IdeaPad 330 away from home.

With a runtime of 5 hours and 52 minutes on our Laptop Mag battery examination (continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi at 150 nits), the IdeaPad 330 powered down several hours before the Aspire E xv (eight:48) and Swift 1 (10:xiv).

MORE:
The Laptops with the Longest Battery Life: Guide

The IdeaPad 330 couldn’t outlast the budget laptop category average (7:20), but if it’s any consolation, it did better than the embarrassingly short-lived Inspiron 15 3000 (3:xvi).

Webcam

Do the person on the other end of your video chat a favor and don’t use the IdeaPad 330’s integrated webcam. The 640 x 480 lens is possibly the worst I’ve seen on a laptop, which is quite a feat considering that most webcams we test are simply atrocious.

I was practically indistinguishable in the selfie I shot in our dimly-lit office. The image was so fuzzy that my hair was one solid blob and my eyes looked like hazy, dark pits. To make matters worse, the lights behind me washed out everything they touched, and my rich reddish shirt looked bleached out. Be sure to spring for a
defended webcam
if you lot program on doing videoconferencing.

Oestrus

The IdeaPad 330 remained relatively cool, even when we taxed it by playing a 15-infinitesimal, full-screen video. The touchpad and keyboard warmed to merely 81 degrees and 83 degrees, respectively. Only the underside of the laptop breached our 95-degree comfort threshold, hit 96 degrees.

Bottom Line

The IdeaPad 330 is an ultra-affordable laptop with a big, 15.half-dozen-inch display, a good keyboard, and a solid, durable chassis. That might exist enough for some folks, but the IdeaPad 330 has too many shortcomings – including short battery life, a wearisome display, and below-par performance – for information technology to earn our outright recommendation.

It’d be easy to overlook these bug if in that location weren’t better options in the market. But some similarly priced laptops, like the
Acer Aspire E 15
($379), simply offer more than for the money. Information technology’due south also worth considering the
Acer Swift 1, which has a smaller, 14-inch display but long battery life, an aluminum chassis and a much better webcam.

Withal, if y’all have less than $300 to spend, the IdeaPad 330 is a decent option — then long equally yous keep your expectations in check.

Credit: Laptop Mag

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