Posted 09/29/09 at 08:24:11 AM by Paul Lilly

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.

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Posted 08/18/09 at 06:44:28 PM by Andy Salisbury

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

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Posted 02/25/09 at 01:45:49 PM by Paul Lilly

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.

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Posted 01/06/09 at 02:30:00 PM by Paul Lilly

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).

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Posted 09/18/08 at 01:52:20 PM by Gordon Mah Ung

 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.

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Posted 08/12/08 at 05:20:39 PM by Nathan Edwards

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.

Click though for more spec details, our impressions, and a ton of photos

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Posted 06/24/08 at 09:14:14 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

From the Air to the Pro, Apple’s MacBooks are winning the hearts and minds of consumers everywhere—including PC enthusiasts. Maximum PC investigates whether the hoopla is warranted.

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.

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Posted 06/24/08 at 03:20:41 PM by Will Smith

Proof you can have your 3-pound cake and eat it too.

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.

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