Lenovo 3000 V100 Review

Speaking of the two-button touchpad, it took us a while to learn to keep our tapping finger clear of the vertical-scrolling area at its right edge, but it was otherwise a smooth operator. We had mixed feelings, however, about the Lenovo's keypad: It has the full-sized keys and superb typing feel that have delighted ThinkPad users for years, but also a few layout quirks.

Both the Ctrl and Delete keys are pushed aside by other keys instead of occupying what we consider their ideal bottom-left and top-right corners, respectively. And while petite PgUp and PgDn keys accompany the inverted-T cursor arrows, the former double up with a Fn key in lieu of dedicated Home and End keys. We adjusted to the Delete key's third-from-the-right placement with practice, but commands such as Shift-Ctrl-End remained clumsy.

The LG dual-layer DVD±RW drive is on the system's right side, along with a flash-memory-card slot, an on/off switch for the notebook's 802.11a/b/g and Bluetooth wireless radios, modem and Ethernet jacks, and one USB 2.0 port (stylishly placed vertically instead of horizontally). Another USB port is at the rear and a third on the Lenovo's left side, where you'll also find VGA and FireWire ports along with microphone and headphone jacks and a PC Card slot.

The V100's VibrantView display -- Lenovo's label for the high-gloss black rather than gray flat panels rapidly becoming standard laptop fare -- is a DVD-worthy widescreen LCD; its 1,280 by 800-pixel resolution is a good compromise between providing extra screen space and cramming too much resolution (and too-small text and icons) into a 12.1-inch diagonal.

But while colors were clear and details were crisp, the display looked a little dim to us -- it's a familiar experience in our reviews to like only the top one or two of a notebook's brightness settings, but even the top setting, even on AC power, was a bit less bright than we'd like. Again, it's a subjective gripe rather than a damning indictment; it's not like we didn't contentedly carry and work with the V100 for several weeks.

Warning: May Be Faster Than Your Current Desktop

While the screen is a good location for movies and images, the Graphics Media Accelerator 950 component of Intel's 945GM integrated chipset keeps the V100 firmly on the business rather than gaming side of the benchmark divide. Our test unit managed 27 frames per second in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, but its native-resolution score of 117 in Futuremark's 3DMark06 and XGA-resolution score of 463 in 3DMark05 indicate it's simply not built for the speedy rendering and antialiasing of today's shoot-'em-up software.

By contrast, the dual-core muscle, 667MHz front-side bus, and 2MB Level 2 cache of Intel's Core Duo T2500 CPU push the Lenovo past many larger, single-core laptops in other benchmarks. The slimline scored a very respectable 201 in BAPCo's SysMark 2004 (Internet Content Creation 263, Office Productivity 154), with a PCMark05 rating of 3,011 (CPU 4,614; memory 2,990; hard drive 3,518; graphics 918).

Our V100 included a 6-cell lithium-ion battery in place of base models' 3-cell pack. The latter probably wouldn't make our unofficial minimum runtime of 90 minutes, but the 6-cell gave us a tolerable three hours of unplugged productivity, plus or minus -- disk- and multimedia-intensive sessions lasted two hours and 40 or 45 minutes, while quieter word-processing stints stretched to three and a quarter hours.

If not for the notebook's slightly awkward keyboard and slightly dark display, this would be a rave review. As is, the V100 definitely impresses and makes us look forward to future Lenovo laptops. Before long, even conservative IT buyers may not miss the ThinkPad label -- although Lenovo really needs something better than its odd double-numeric branding; 3000 V100 sounds like some kind of exponent in an equation.

Skip To Page 1 The Face Is Familiar, The Technology's Fresh • 2 Dual-Core Makes a Difference

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