HardwareCentral - Lenovo 3000 V100 Review

Lenovo 3000 V100 Review

The Face Is Familiar, The Technology's Fresh

July 5, 2006
By Eric Grevstad

You've often heard that the successor to a successful person or company has big shoes to fill. If they're Big Blue's shoes, it's even harder.

Lenovo has been careful not to jolt customers since acquiring IBM's PC business 14 months ago. The Chinese firm still offers five notebooks under the ThinkPad brand, although it's happily trimmed IBM's practice of confronting would-be buyers with a dozen configurations of each (256K and CD-ROM, anyone?).

But while pitching the ThinkPads as corporate IT choices, Lenovo has targeted small businesses with three house-brand laptops dubbed the 3000 series. The lightest and swankiest, the 3000 V100, is a 4.4-pound slimline with a 12.1-inch, wide-aspect-ratio display and built-in optical drive -- differentiating it from the ultralight ThinkPad X60, which relegates its DVD burner to a snap-on, swappable drive-bay base.

Lenovo has also dropped IBM's practice of pricing at the peak of the portable market: With a Core Duo T2500 (2.0GHz) processor, 1GB of DDR memory, a 100GB hard disk, DVD±RW drive, biometric-security fingerprint reader, and Windows XP Professional, our test unit came in at a reasonable $1,649 ($1,599 if you skip the built-in teleconferencing or video-chat Webcam). A 1.66GHz Core Duo T2300 model starts at $1,099 with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive.

With fit and finish up to, well, ThinkPad standards, the V100 struck us at first sight as an exceptionally tempting pick in the lightweight laptop category. As we spent time with the notebook, we found a couple of features to be less than perfect, but they didn't lower the score enough to knock the Lenovo off our suggested shopping list for lightweight laptop seekers.

Fabulous Firmware

Measuring 9.5 by 12 by 1.3 inches and totaling 5.2 pounds with its AC adapter, the V100 won't elbow aside other items in your briefcase. Nostalgia lovers will notice that the 100GB, 5,400-rpm Hitachi hard disk still carries the label IBM_PRELOAD and contains folders such as \IBMTOOLS.

They'll also notice that Lenovo has kept IBM's superlative onboard diagnostic and security suite: Even if Windows won't boot, pressing a Lenovo Care button above the keyboard during bootup brings you to a Linux-based array of help screens including everything from a Web browser for driver downloads to recovery of lost files or restoration of the whole hard drive to its original factory image. (Pushing the button while Win XP is running brings a similar Windows-based help system; there's also a Taskbar icon that offers pop-up messages or update suggestions.) The system is even nicer than the Rescue and Recovery menu built into the ThinkPad X60 predecessor, the X40 we touted in 2004.

Nor is Lenovo all work and no play: Press another button during startup, and the system skips Windows in favor of a quick-launch console for playing MP3 songs, DVDs, or slide shows or video clips on the hard disk. Some of the keyboard navigation functions aren't too intuitive, but the instant-entertainment firmware is an appealing addition.

The V100's software bundle loads no fewer than 17 Taskbar icons at startup. Available for your perusal are trial versions of Norton Internet Security 2005 and Corel's productivity packages (a full version of WordPerfect 12 is the exception to the limited-time-offer rule), as well as Google's Desktop, Internet Explorer toolbar, and Picasa plus InterVideo and Roxio DVD-viewing, -burning, and disc-mastering utilities.

Supplied software captures stills or video clips from the 640 by 480-pixel Webcam mounted just above the screen, while Softex's OmniPass handles fingerprint-scan access to passwords or files. The fingerprint reader is a tiny strip to the right of the keyboard touchpad; it proved more balky about enrolling and recognizing prints than some larger sensors we've used.

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