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Lenovo Boasts Fastest Windows 7 Boot Time

Paul Lilly — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:24:11 -0500

If this were the Old West, Lenovo would be the gritty cowboy boasting the fastest draw in town. Challengers, both new and old, would step up and challenge the gunslinger to a shoot out, and at some point, Lenovo would likely fall.

In the modern era, Lenovo doesn't have to worry about catching a bullet between its eyes, but it will have to back up its claim of having the fastest Windows 7 boot-up and shutdown times. According to Lenovo, its ThinkPad notebooks and ThinkCentre desktop PCs for businesses load Windows 7 up to 56 percent faster compared to booting XP or Vista.

The company also said its IdeaPad and IdeaCentre consumer PCs certified for "Windows 7 Lenovo Enhanced Experience" will load 33 percent faster and shutdown 50 percent faster than hardware that's not certified, even if using identical components. How is this possible? Through BIOS tweaks, Windows 7optimizations, special onboard hardware drives, and a rewritten power manager, Lenovo says.

Lenovo Offers to Replace Low-Functioning Batteries

Andy Salisbury — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:44:28 -0500

If you’ve got a Lenovo laptop with a battery that’s providing sub-par performance, you just might be eligible for a free replacement.

The batteries in question don’t present any fire or safety hazard, so there’s no reason to worry about your health – the folks at Lenovo are simply looking to make nice. “Irreparable damage” and “battery cannot be charged” error messages from the Power Manager or Message Center are the main indicators that you have a bad battery.

If you’re not sure, but you have a ThinkPad R60, R61, T60 or T61 with battery FRU part numbers 42T4546, 42T4566 or 92P1141, and/or a model X60 or X61, with battery part numbers 42T4550, 42T4567, 42T4568, 92P1169, 92P1173, 93P5028 or 93P5030, it’s suggested that you should run the Battery Diagnostic Tool (available here), to find out if you need to swap it out

Image Credit: Lenovo

ThinkPads Survive Military-Grade Punishment, Says Lenovo

Paul Lilly — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:45:49 -0600

According to Lenovo, eight new ThinkPad laptop models meet military specs for semi-rugged computing. These include the ThinkPad X200, X301, X200s, X200 Tablet, T400, T500, R400, and SL300 laptops.

"ThinkPad is well known for quality, reliability and innovative security technologies for business computing," said Tom Ribble, executive director, Worldwide ThinkPad Product Marketing, Lenovo. "The truth is we've always built tough laptops that can weather extreme conditions from hiking the rainforests of the Amazon to flying in space. You don't need a PC that looks like a tank to excel in harsh environments, and unlike many of our competitors, we don't put an extra charge on toughness."

Though not billed as a 'ruggedized' laptop, Lenovo claims its military-grade models can withstand a barrage of brutal testing environments. Lenovo subjected its new ThinkPads to various harsh elements, such as low pressure operation at 15,000 feet, cycling 95 percent humidity through the environment, baking the laptops up to 140 degrees, testing at minus 4 degrees, fluctuations between extreme hot and cold, and subjecting the units to blasts of dust for an extended amount of time.

Given all that the ThinkPads withstood, we're not sure when an Accident Protection plan would come in handy, but Lenovo offers it nonetheless.

Lenovo says the ThinkPad T400 laptop with high brightness screen (680-nit) is available now through Lenovo business partners with pricing starting at $1,350.

Image Credit: Lenovo

Seeing Double: Lenovo Introduces Dual Screen W700ds

Paul Lilly — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:30:00 -0600

As if we weren't already enamored with Lenovo's monstrous W700 Thinkpad, which earned a 9-verdict/Kickass award thanks in large part to a combination of high end hardware and a high color gamut screen, Lenovo's new dual-screen W700ds has us doing a double take.

All the innards remain the same, but this time around Lenovo adds a secondary 10.6-inch display to the exterior. That's larger than some netbooks! The 400-nit, 72 percent wide color gamut WUXGA display slides neatly out from the PC cover behind the primary display giving mobile power users the same dual-screen goodness as a multi-monitor desktop, albeit in a smaller package. The secondary display can be tilted up to 30 degrees and only adds a few millimeters in additional thickness to the Thinkpad, GottaBeMobile says.

"The ThinkPad W700ds dual screen mobile workstation challenged our international development team to engineer a notebook to fit the way workstation users work - in the office and on the road,” said Mark Cohen, vice president, Notebook Business Unit, Lenovo. “Bringing this level of innovation to the most extreme PC users required continually balancing size and functionality with keeping the PC cool and quiet."

The W700ds is available now direct from Lenovo with pricing starting at $3,663 (currently on sale starting at $3,070).

Image Credit: Lenovo

Lenovo Thinkpad W700

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:52:20 -0500

Let’s face it, the only real difference between a mobile workstation and gaming notebook has been the sticker and GPU drivers. Lenovo’s ground-breaking W700 changes that with a slew of features that truly make it worthy of being called a workstation notebook. But it’s not just about the W700’s 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme Q9300 quad core or its Quadro FX 3700M with 1GB frame buffer alone.

To us, it’s the integrated Wacom tablet that tells us Lenovo just didn’t take a big-ass gaming notebook and stuff a Quadro in it. It doesn’t hurt that the W700 boasts a 400nit daylight readable screen either. The screen is bright but not as brilliant as the dual-tube displays that Toshiba used to use in its home theater PCs.

The 1920x1200 panel Lenovo uses 72 percent color gamut screen (of Adobe color gamut) which is much higher than previous designs. Most other notebooks can display only about 42 percent of the Adobe color gamut. Only Hewlett-Packard’s upcoming DreamColor panel in the EliteBook 8530p is likely to give the W700 a run for the money in color gamut.

Workstation, does mean “work” though and the W700 is more than capable. We’ve seen comments on our forum where readers questioned if a quad-core was needed in a notebook. In our book, hell yes. Unless, that is, you like sitting around waiting for things to happen. For example, the W700 takes 831 seconds to complete our Premiere Pro CS3 test. The dual-core Gateway P-7811 FX that we reviewed in our October issue takes 2,143 with its 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo. The W700 also takes half the time to spit our HD slideshow using ProShow Producer than the P-7811 FX.

The Quado FX 3700M’s large 1GB frame buffer may make you think that it’s made for gaming, but many content creation apps actually need the large frame buffer more than games. While it’s not intended as a gaming part, it does OK but it won’t outpace the Gateway P-7811 FX gaming notebook and its GeForce 9800N GTS part. We also fired up Crysis and tried to push it at very high at 1920x1200 and the results weren’t pretty. It ran but we wouldn’t play the game that way. It’s better suited for playing Crysis at 1024x768 or 1280x1024 instead. The W700 is more than enough to play Unreal Tournament 3 and is capable of 48 fps at 1920x1200 resolution. So while it’s capable of gaming, it probably doesn’t make sense to buy the W700 if that’s your only purpose. The Gateway P-7811 FX is a better fit and far cheaper.

You’re probably saying that it’s not fair to compare a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo versus a 2.53GHz Core 2 Extreme but our experience with desktops tells that even if the dual core was running at 3GHz the quad core would still stomp it good. The short story is that if you care about performance and you use multi-threaded apps (and most content creation apps are today) you need a quad core. To believe anything else is simply wrong.

In amenities, the W700 has almost everything you need – a Gigabit Ethernet port, five USB 2.0 ports, dual-link DVI-D, VGA, DisplayPort and a card reader. An ExpressCard 34 is included a second slot can be added with either a ExpressCard 54, smart card or Compact Flash reader. One thing that’s notably missing: eSATA. That can be run via ExpressCard, of course, but why not include it Lenovo?

We’re also not sure you need to have Windows Vista Ultimate, but that’s what Lenovo configured this box with. Fortunately, it’s the 64-bit version and to take advantage of that, Lenovo installed 4GB of DDR3/1066 DIMMs.

The W700 comes with a 9-cell battery that you gives you just above dismal in runtime. Let’s just say that you won’t finish watching Return Of The King without running for an outlet. That’s without cranking up the quad-core.

In storage, our W700 came configured with a pair of 160GB 7,200 RPM drives in RAID 0. While fast for a notebook, it’s not our top pick. If we needed read speed, we’d run Intel’s new X25-M in one bay and a 500GB drive in the other. If drive speed can be sacrificed for safety, a pair of 500GB drives in RAID 1 would make us feel a whole lot better about our data.

One really nifty feature of the W700 is the built-in HueyPro color calibrator. If you do any serious image editing, video editing or work that must have strict color control, calibration is a must have. With the W700, you fire up the HueyPro applet, hit the start button and close the lid. The W700 beeps when the display is properly calibrated.

Now for what’s going to hang up most people: the size. This sucker looks huge. In some ways, it even looks bigger than those huge Pentium 4-based notebooks that were the rage three years ago. That’s because it is actually a little bigger by about an inch. We compared the W700 to very old Clevo D900T and the W700 is about an inch deeper than the Clevo. The good news is that it’s lighter. As large as the W700, it’s actually only 8.3 lbs. That makes it a two to three pounds lighter than the Clevo D900T notebooks.

If we were to fire up the W700 alongside those old P4 notebooks of yore, the performance differences would be astounding. Ultimately that’s what it comes down to with mobile workstations – performance. And if performance matters to you for your job, we think you should check out the W700.

Hands-on with Lenovo's Monstrous W700 17" ThinkPad -- Photos and Impressions

Nathan Edwards — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:20:39 -0500

When we first walked into our meeting with Lenovo last week, we thought it was an oversized mockup. Sure, it looked like a ThinkPad. But it was huge! We're used to small, slim, no-nonsense ThinkPads; we were unprepared for this. Who would want a 17" ThinkPad?

Once we took a closer look at the just-announced W700, though, we got our answer: We want one. Maybe it's the integrated Wacom digitizer. Or the onboard HueyPro color calibrator. Or maybe we like the idea of a 640GB RAID array in a laptop. Or the 1GB of dedicated graphics memory. This is a big, powerful system, aimed at digital content professionals: photographers, videographers, animators, CAD/CAM engineers, and the like.

Looking closely at the specs, we can see that Lenovo’s not pulling any punches. The W700 will be the first notebook to ship with Intel’s not-so-secret Core 2 Extreme mobile quad-core CPU (officially launching at next week’s Intel Developer’s Conference), and the first with Nvidia’s just-announced Quadro FX3700M GPU, which has 1GB of video memory (Lenovo claims internal testing yielded over 10,000 in 3DMark06). Oh, and they’ll also put in up to 8GB of DDR3 memory.

The onboard HueyPro color calibrator will be especially handy with the professional-quality 1920x1200 WUXGA screen (a 72% Gamut 400 NIT display). To calibrate, you simple activate the program and clamp down the laptop lid – the software does the rest. With such a high end display, Lenovo recommends that users calibrate once a week.

And that integrated Wacom tablet? It’s a sizeable 12cm by 8cm digitizer that’s activated with a magnetic pen that hides in the side of the notebook. You can use it with digital content applications like Photoshop or Illustrator or configure it to map to the entire screen to manipulate your cursor.

The W700 also boasts a 7-in-1 media card reader, integrated camera, 5 USB ports, and plenty of display outputs – Dual Link DVI, VGA, even DisplayPort. Unfortunately, you’ll have to look to the optional port replicator dock for eSATA support (priced at $279).

The whole thing weighs about 8.3lbs, and Lenovo says it’ll get between 2.5 and 3 hours of battery life, which is hardly earth-shattering but a lot better than we’d expect from such a big machine. Placed next to a slim Thinkpad X300, the W700 dwarfs the ultraportable in comparison. We can’t imagine lugging it on business trips across the country, but we could see professionals using it as a desktop replacement at the office and bringing it home to work at night.

Prices will start at about $3K, and the machine will be pretty customizable – you can leave out the Wacom, calibrator, or both, and choose between normal hard drives (up to 320GB each at 5400RPM in RAID, or 200GB each at 7200 RPM) and SSDs (up to 128GB). Expect to pay upwards of five grand for a fully kitted-out notebook.

Apple's Notebooks Take On the PC Competition

The Maximum PC Staff — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:14:14 -0500

MacBooks have become the darlings of the computer press. They’re capturing the attention of first-time notebook buyers and even converting a growing number of long-time PC owners who are looking for that elusive “perfect” mobile computer. A report on recent notebook sales figures reflects the MacBook’s momentum.

Findings by market research firm the NDP Group show that brick-and-mortar sales of Apple notebooks experienced a 50 to 60 percent growth in the first quarter of 2008, while Windows notebook sales remained flat. In the premium notebook category—encompassing machines costing $1,000 or more—Apple now claims a whopping 64 percent market share.

But are these slick hipster notebooks worth the hype and their spendy price tags? What do you really get for the money when you throw down for a MacBook, and how do these Apple computers compare to their PC counterparts in terms of performance, features, overall usability, and price?

Maximum PC tests and reviews the MacBook Air, the standard MacBook, and the MacBook Pro against five PC models sporting similar price points and formfactors. It’s time we set the record straight.

Categorical Differences

Apple’s presence in the notebook market spans three distinct classes. Here’s how we define them and the key features we think each class demands. Click each heading to jump to the relevant page.

Ultraportable

Maximum 4 lbs. lap weight
11- to 13-inch screen
Minimum 4-hour battery life
Transflective screen surface
Real keyboard
Video output
ExpressCard slot
Optical drive (optional)

Mainstream

Affordable
Dual-core processor
160GB or more storage capacity
Maximum 7 lbs. lap weight
13- to 15-inch screen
Optical drive
Appropriate expansion slots

Professional

Dual-core processor
Discrete graphics
15-inch or larger screen
Maximum 8 lbs. lap weight
Appropriate expansion slots
Robust video-out
DVD burner

Our Testing Strategy

Evaluating a notebook is very different from evaluating a desktop PC.

A notebook PC isn’t like a desktop rig. Tricked out, water cooled, and overclocked like a mutha, your Guns of Navarone desktop rig will live a life that’s similar to your mom’s PC: sitting safely underneath your desk. And while you can freely upgrade your PC’s peripherals—its keyboard, monitor, and mouse—a notebook is everything it’s ever going to be the first day you get it. The trackpad can’t be replaced nor can the LCD screen. If the mushy keyboard annoys you, tough luck.

So our reviews of these notebooks focus on not only performance but also usability and price.

Usability

This is a crucial factor in a notebook’s success. It includes the keyboard’s feel, the placement of the trackpad, the number and variety of ports, the machine’s weight and size, the thermals, the quality of the screen, as well as the overall look and feel. It’s a lengthy list of review points, which explains why usability figures so prominently in our final assessment.

Performance

Don’t get us wrong—performance matters. Unless your activities are strictly confined to Microsoft Office and Firefox, you’re going to notice when, for example, it takes five minutes to enact a simple photo edit. To test a notebook’s performance, we look to our standard suite of desktop benchmarks, which stress video editing and encoding, photo editing, and slide-show creation. We also run two older games at moderate resolutions to see if a notebook will function as a stand-in gaming machine.

Obviously, we can’t run our benchmarks in OS X because the majority of our tests don’t offer OS X support. To truly assess how well Apple’s notebooks measure up as PCs, we dual-booted the MacBooks into Windows Vista Home Premium and ran the benchmarks in that OS—for an apples-to-apples comparison among all models. (To get a sense of the performance difference between a MacBook running OS X vs. Vista, see page 43, where we show the results of tests using apps that are native to both OSes.)

Price

The Mac has historically been at a price disadvantage to the PC, but is this still the case today? Read on and you’ll see how these x86 Macs stack up in terms of specs and price. While not quite as important as performance and usability, price will also figure into our verdicts.

Next: Ultraportable Notebooks Face Off

Individual Ultraportable Reviews

Best in Class: Ultraportable

Not too big and not too small, the ThinkPad X300 delivers the perfect balance of performance and size in a killer package.

After running the benchmarks, crunching the numbers, and spending days doing usability testing the old-fashioned way—using the laptops in real-world situations—we decided that of the three ultraportable machines tested here, the one we’d buy with our own money is the Lenovo ThinkPad X300. Even though you can buy two MacBook Airs for what this ThinkPad cost.

The decision in this category ultimately came down to survivability and usability. Both the Sony Vaio and MacBook Air seemed fragile, and we worried about their ability to withstand the wear and tear of heavy use. The ThinkPad feels sturdier than laptops twice its weight, and its SSD drive should deliver better survivability than the old-school spindles and heads in the other two machines. Unfortunately, that SSD also adds at least a grand to the X300’s price, which is a huge premium to pay if your idea of high-risk computing is balancing the machine on one knee while you veg out in front of the tube during Shark Week. Lenovo desperately needs to add a budget X300 using standard hard drives.

The ThinkPad’s screen might not shine like those of its glossy-paneled completion, but it actually makes the notebook far more versatile. When we took all three of the ultraportable models outdoors, only the X300 remained usable—turns out there’s something to be said for the screen’s dowdy anti-glare coating, which is not an option with the Air and Vaio. Add to that the X300’s comfortable keyboard and plethora of input options and you have a solid all-around offering. Sure, it could stand a few more inputs and outputs, but with three USB ports we’re satiated.

Performance is less crucial in the ultraportable category, but the ThinkPad delivered more than respectable scores in most of our benchmarks, losing to the Sony by a smaller margin than we expected, given the differences in hardware. We’re especially impressed with the X300’s Photoshop results, which show the read benefits SSD users can expect.

That said, none of these laptops is bad—if you don’t mind dealing with the abundance of crapware on the Vaio, that is. Folks shopping for a relatively inexpensive 3-pound laptop will find the MacBook Air to be a stunning value at $1,800. We’d never advocate using it as your only PC, but as a mobile option it’s pretty compelling. The Sony Vaio delivers impressive performance, but we’d expect more solid build quality for the $2,600 price.

Next: Mainstream Notebooks

Ultraportable Benchmarks

	Apple MacBook Air	Sony Vaio SZ Premium	Lenovo ThinkPad X300
Premiere Pro CS3 (min:sec)	59:21	47:22	59:01
Photoshop CS3 (min:sec)	6:07	3:08	5:36
ProShow (min:sec)	95:11	35:44	63:25
MainConcept (min:sec)	174:11	59:52	119:36
Fear (fps)	WNR	WNR	WNR
Quake 4 (fps)	WNR	WNR	WNR
Battery Rundown (hrs:min)	2:39	3:02	3:01

Best scores are bolded.

Individual Mainstream Notebook Reviews

Best in Class: Mainstream

The MacBook wins the sprint but loses the marathon

If laptops were dogs, we’d award Acer’s TravelMate Best in Show. The MacBook may be the cute dog that’s the crowd favorite, but its refusal to obey commands cost it points. And the Asus F8Sn would be stuck in its crate in the back doing the one thing it can do right: spin in a circle.

Things would be different if we looked at just a single category. Take gaming, for example. Hands down, the F8Sn crushes the other contenders with its built-in GeForce 9500M GS videocard. The TravelMate’s discrete graphics are no match for the F8Sn’s performance, and the MacBook—well, four frames per second in a game like FEAR is downright shameful, solidifying the white laptop’s standing as a gamer’s foe.

But the F8Sn’s gaming prowess comes at a great cost. To keep the machine affordable, Asus includes a paltry 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo CPU. Thus, the other laptops in this category speed past the F8Sn in nearly every other non-gaming benchmark. And worse, the F8Sn’s mighty graphics card sucks the battery life during normal use.

While the MacBook owns the competition in a few of our encoding benchmarks, thanks to its nifty Penryn processor, the notebook falls flat on more memory-intensive tests. The single gigabyte of DDR2 RAM proves to be this laptop’s undoing once video conversion and high-definition picture processing come into play. Still, the MacBook achieves nearly three hours of battery life—a full 20 minutes more than Acer’s TravelMate.

So how does one decide a clear victor? It’s not easy. Each laptop comes with little bits and pieces that we’d like to see changed: the TravelMate’s 160GB hard drive and inclusion of Windows Vista Business, the F8Sn’s horrific processor speed and lackluster battery life, the MacBook’s lack of external connection options and poor gaming performance. But at this price point, the midrange laptop class is all about sacrifices. You’re not going to find a perfect notebook in this cohort, but you can definitely find one that includes most of the qualities you’re seeking.

In that sense, the TravelMate comes out on top by a wide margin, mostly because you don’t have to sacrifice a great deal of performance to get what you want. Its gaming prowess isn’t the best we’ve seen, but the laptop holds its own in our benchmarks without crushing the machine’s overall battery life. Its application performance rivals the MacBook’s best, and we’d much rather have the extra 40GB of hard drive space, faster Premiere and Photoshop times, and larger display—not to mention the external connection options, where the TravelMate far exceeds the MacBook’s limited offerings.

When it comes to mainstream notebooks, we’d happily take Acer’s TravelMate on the road any day of the week. But if someone gave us a MacBook, we wouldn’t complain—we can’t say the same about Asus’s F8Sn.

Next: Professional Notebooks

Mainstream Notebook Benchmarks

	Apple MacBook	Asus F8Sn	Acer TravelMate 5720
Premiere Pro CS3 (min:sec)	38:43	48:38	35:59
Photoshop CS3 (min:sec)	5:48	4:12	3:53
ProShow (min:sec)	38:10	56:53	40:32
MainConcept (min:sec)	68:11	83:10	68:08
Fear (fps)	4	22	15
Quake 4 (fps)	10.3	79.2	29
Battery Rundown (hrs:min)	3:26	1:42	2:32

Best scores are bolded.

Individual Professional Notebook Reviews

Best in Class: Professional

Don't rub your eyes, the MacBook is the winner (!)

In many ways, Dell’s XPS M1530 is the better notebook of the two. Its screen is better by a country mile in photo rendering, it’s faster in gaming, it has built-in EVDO—something you can’t even get from Apple—and it costs $500 less for comparable hardware.

So why are we declaring the MacBook Pro the winner? We had a few issues with our XPS unit, such as unexplainably low scores in our Premiere Pro CS3 test that gave us the shivers: It took more than twice as long as our MacBook Pro to render video and was quite a bit slower in our Photoshop CS3 test.

We have no idea why. The XPS was just about as fast as the MBP in our MainConcept encoding test and faster at slide-show creation, which would typically translate to comparable scores in our two Adobe-based benchmarks.

As for the XPS’s beefy 9-cell battery, the machine pooped out after 2:45 (hrs:min) of DVD playback. The MacBook Pro, running the OS X-based DVD app, had us up past midnight waiting for the damned thing to die at 3:15—and that’s using an internal battery that doesn’t pork up the formfactor. Whether the weak rundown time was caused by the unoptimized Windows Media Center DVD player or some CPU-sapping third-party app that Dell installed on the XPS, we weren’t happy with the results.

The XPS is redeemed in port selection, with three USB ports, as well as S-Video, HDMI, and VGA, compared to the MacBook Pro’s single DVI and two USB ports. And the XPS clearly has the better screen. Although favored by professional photographers, the MBP’s screen is subpar and displays horrible banding in OS X. The XPS also bests the MBP with EVDO.

And remember, the XPS is $500 less—and that’s without taking into account the cost of a Windows license if to run your games or other applications on the MBP.

That’s what makes our pick stick in our craw so much. The XPS is better in many respects, but it has the same weaknesses as most OEM PCs. From the get-go, even though Dell’s load out is better than most others here, it’s still bogged down by third-party bloatware. And Vista drivers might be better today than they were, but something, somewhere in the XPS is dragging down battery life and performance.

That puts the admittedly overpriced MacBook Pro in the pole position. While that’s likely to piss off many PC diehards, perhaps it’s time those folks finally admit the MacBook Pro to the power-PC family.

Next: OSX: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

Professional Notebook Benchmarks

	Apple MacBook Pro	Dell XPS M1530
Premiere Pro CS3 (min:sec)	30:12	65:00
Photoshop CS3 (min:sec)	3:44	4:08
ProShow (min:sec)	34:21	32:28
MainConcept (min:sec)	56:17	57:09
Fear (fps)	45	49
Quake 4 (fps)	83.5	103.3
Battery Rundown (hrs:min)	3:15	2:45

Best scores are bolded.

OS X: The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly

The biggest difference between an Apple notebook and its PC counterparts is the operating system. Sure, Apple’s adoption of the x86 architecture makes it quite possible to run Windows on an Apple machine, but here’s a crash course in the unique features Apple’s home-grown OS offers and the pitfalls of running Windows on a Mac.

OS X is a Lot Like Windows

Switching OSes is always tough, but Apple does a good job of making Windows users feel right at home. Many Windows-specific keyboard shortcuts function similarly in OS X and basic file browsing is the same.

OS X is Completely Different from Windows

In other ways, OS X is a very different beast. For example, instead of storing all the bits and pieces of your installed apps in a folder on your hard drive, everything the app needs to run is stored in a container file. To start the app, you double-click the container. It’s deceptively simple, and we like it.

Windows on a Mac is a Little Weird

Installing Windows on a MacBook is easier than installing it on many enthusiast PCs. You start the installer from inside OS X; when the Windows install completes, you run a single app that installs all necessary drivers. Unfortunately, some commonly used notebook functions, such as tap to click on the touchpad, don’t work.

OS X is Really, Really Slick

Using an operating system that’s designed for power users and newbies alike is truly glorious.

You'll Need to Rebuy All Your Applications

Replacing apps could cost you nothing—or thousands of dollars.

You'll Need Cooler Pants

When people see you toting a MacBook around, they’ll expect that you’re a little more Justin Long than John Hodgman, and your circa 1987 Lee’s don’t send that message, chief.

Performance in OS X is Pretty Darn Good

We last compared OS X and Windows performance right after Apple switched to Intel x86, and the results for OS X were ugly, thanks possibly to the emulation layer that most Mac software used. Now two and a half years later, we can say things are looking far better for OS X. Photoshop, which was a total joke in 2006 on the Intel Macs, is definitely improved. Though still slower than on Windows Vista, at least you won’t be firing cruise missiles at John Warnock and Steve Jobs.

In other applications, OS X performance is quite peppy. We used Bibble Pro to convert 233 Canon EOS 5D RAW files to JPEG. OS X outsprinted Vista. Using HandBrake to convert an episode of The Rockford Files also saw OS X in front. Not every application has been optimized for the “Mactel” machines, but it looks like the worst storm clouds are over for Apple in performance.

Back to the First Page

Benchmarks

	OSX Leopard	Windows Vista Home Premium
Photoshop CS3 (min:sec)	3:56	3:44
Bibble Pro (min:sec)	14:18	24:46
Handbrake VOB to iPod (min:sec)	4:26	5:41

Best scores are bolded. All tests were run on the MacBook Pro.

Lenovo ThinkPad X300

Will Smith — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:20:41 -0500

When you pick up a Lenovo ThinkPad X300, you pick up 3 pounds, 6 ounces of excellence. In every way that the MacBook Air is stylish and beautiful, the X300 is built to perform. No usability is sacrificed for visual appeal—inside this unassuming black chassis is a workhorse. It sounds like an oxymoron, but this is one sturdy 3-pound portable.

The ThinkPad held its own in most of our benchmarks and excelled in battery life as well as the Photoshop and Premiere tests. Overall, however, it was bested by Sony’s Vaio, which has double the memory and a 1.3GHz-faster CPU. The ThinkPad is the only rig in our roundup with a solid-state drive, but we didn’t see any huge performance gains as a result. Unlike the Air, which includes SSD as an option, it’s a non-negotiable feature of the X300. We’re not convinced that SSD is ready for mass consumption yet, but there’s something liberating about storing your data on a drive with no moving parts.

When it comes to usability, the X300 really shines. With the SSD drive, we don’t hesitate to pick up a still-running laptop, whether it’s to carry it down the hall for a meeting or to chuck it in our bag to go home. The full-size keyboard makes for the best typing experience in the ultraportable field. It’s not as comfortable as a real desktop keyboard, but it’s darn close. And while we think the touchpad on this notebook is too small, it’s augmented with an oversize pointing nub. If you use the two together, you get a good mix of fine and granular control. Best of all, in our real-world testing, we got nearly five hours of life on a single battery charge and just over three hours with our video playback test.

While the Vaio’s software bundle is at best an annoyance and at worst a liability, the X300’s adds value. Its nerd-friendly software lets you easily tie power profiles to your location, as determined by your network connection. This allows you to set access and battery conservation rules automatically when you change location. We also love the detailed battery diagnostics, which expose everything you’d ever want to know about your laptop’s battery, as well as the extremely fine control Lenovo gives you over every aspect of the X300’s power-management facilities.

A few significant flaws preclude the X300 from earning a Kick Ass award. The LED-backlit screen’s anti-glare coating is eminently practical, and we love the extra pixels the 1440x900 resolution gives us, but the display is a little meh. Colors appeared washed out, and we longed for more brightness. We also wish that the X300 was available with a more cost-effective traditional hard drive. We appreciate SSD as an option, but the small capacity and high price aren’t right for everyone. The X300 also lacks a few key connection options—expansion card slots, a media reader, any digital video outputs. While the integrated EVDO obviates one of the most common expansion card slots, we wish there was at least an ExpressCard/34 slot.

And, yes, the X300 includes an optical drive.