Design:
The Lenovo Z40 looks like a typical budget laptop, featuring an unremarkable plastic chassis and a matte black finish that tends to smudge easily. The lid tapers gently at the edges, giving the laptop a svelte appearance when it's closed. A silver Lenovo logo at the upper left corner serves as the sole piece of flair on the otherwise unadorned exterior.
The Z40 features an integrated 720p Webcam above the screen. On the deck, the keyboard rests in a slight depression, and the 3.25 by 1.7-inch touch pad is centered beneath the G and H keys. The power button is located above the keyboard at the top left corner of the deck. The edges of the deck curve upward from the bottom, and four rubber feet keep the laptop from sliding around on your desk.
Measuring 13.7 x 9.6 x 1 inches, the Z40 is thin enough that you can tuck it into your bag without much effort. At 4.6 pounds, however, it's heavier than many other 14-inch notebooks.
Features:
The Z40's 14-inch, 1,366x768 screen is relatively bright and colorful, but suffers from extremely narrow vertical viewing angles. Colors become completely washed out when viewed at any angle other than straight-on, making it difficult to read lightly-colored text and menus. To use the Z40 in our lap, we had to push the screen back as far as it could go (about 35 degrees). And as we said, the display has no touch capability, which makes navigating Windows 8.1 a chore.
Performance:
The Z40 features a 1.6GHz "Haswell" Core i5-4200U processor, 6GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive with 8GB solid-state cache, and an Nvidia GeForce 820M GPU with 2GB of video memory. The laptop delivered middling results on our benchmarks, but anecdotally we didn't experience any slowdowns as we composed a Word document while streaming music on Spotify with a dozen Chrome tabs open in the background.
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