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Of the budget laptops we've come across recently, the G500s is one of the better-performing examples.
For £400 you have in your hands a laptop that can happily handle all your everyday tasks. It's nicely specced, looks unpretentious and you can probably run this for a good couple of years without worrying too much that you didn't spend an extra £2-300 on a more powerful model.
We liked
Its real-world performance was generally very good - even with multiple browser tabs open and other applications running at the same time we never really saw a loss of speed.
It's got a great specification too, so no matter what you need to use your laptop for - whether it's burning discs, working on a second display or transferring files faster than ever, thanks to SuperSpeed connections - you're covered. The price is quite reasonable too.
We disliked
Inevitably, a budget laptop will have some corners cut here and there. The most obvious of these, and the one we liked the least, is the keyboard. It's just not really up to scratch, and even a constant hammering of the keys resulted in mis-presses. It's a shame really, because there's nothing particularly wrong elsewhere, aside from a slightly unimpressive screen.
Final verdict
Budget laptops were the dogs of the computing world a few years ago, but it's amazing what you can pick up for the cash these days.
The Lenovo G500s, with its pokey processor, generous memory offering and large hard drive makes it terribly good value for money.
The only problem you have is whether to go for this, or save £50 and go for the slightly less powerful AMD version - the G505.
Alternatively, and we admit this is a little bit of a curveball, if you really like the look of the G500s but want a little bit more processing power, Lenovo does offer the ability to customise it to suit your needs. It could get expensive, though.
