Welcome to a laptop battery specialist
of the Lenovo Laptop Battery
During our battery rundown test, in which we disable power management, enable Wi-Fi, maximise screen brightness, and loop a Full HD MP4 file, the two batteries combined to last for 6hr 16min, with the removable battery being discharged before the internal battery. Charging is via a 45W travel-sized adapter, and it can take a while to fill both batteries with such as Lenovo 40Y8314 Battery, Lenovo FRU 42T5206 Battery, Lenovo FRU 42T5251 Battery, Lenovo 3000 Y300 Battery, Lenovo 43R1954 Battery, Lenovo L08S6D12 Battery, Lenovo IdeaPad U330 Battery, Lenovo IdeaPad Y330 Battery, Lenovo 43R1955 Battery, Lenovo 121TS040C Battery, Lenovo 3000 Y410a Battery, Lenovo 3000 Y400 Battery.
Performance from the Intel Core i5-5200U ultra-low voltage CPU was to our expectations, recording 46sec in our Blender 3D rendering test, and the graphics performance in 3DMark’s Cloud Gate was 4213. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon that reviewed in January used the same CPU and the same amount of RAM and recorded the same exact time in Blender, but was a little faster in Cloud Gate (4720).
Storage performance was expectedly slow in CrystalDiskMark, with the sequential read speed of the hard drive recorded a paltry 57.4 megabytes per second (MBps), while its write speed was faster at 113.2MBps. It’s a far cry from what it could potentially do with an SSD. If we use the ThinkPad Carbon X1 with its 128GB SATA-based SSD as an example, read and write rates from an SSD could be well over 400MBps.
Lenovo has installed a 16GB SSD in conjunction with the 500GB hard drive. This can make the system boot quicker and speed up the loading of regularly used programs. We found the everyday performance of the laptop during our tests to be fine, with our programs loading swiftly, but we’d still be tempted to forgo the internal high storage capacity for the quickness of an SSD. The other disadvantage of having a hard drive instead of an SSD is that the hard drive parks its heads whenever it senses movement, which can cause things like video playback to stutter until the laptop is stationary again.
Other things to note about the ThinkPad T550 are its wireless capabilities, which include an Intel Advanced-AC 7260 82.11ac Wi-Fi module, Bluetooth 4.0, and the option to have in-built 3G or LTE mobile broadband. There is a SIM card slot in the battery compartment.