Lenovo 3000 C100

The Lenovo 3000 C100, the company's first notebook to bear the Lenovo name since taking over IBM's ThinkPad business, eschews the traditional ThinkPad design for a more generic look. What this laptop lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in terms of features, performance, and battery life. Convenient one-touch access to a host of useful utilities solidifies this system as a good investment for small/home office users.

 

This 1.3-inch-thick mainstream notebook is housed in a nondescript black plastic chassis with a silver lid and weighs 6.2 pounds. Fans of ThinkPad notebooks will be happy with Lenovo's decision to carry over the legendary ThinkPad keyboard but may be disappointed by the lack of a trackpoint mouse pointer. Instead, the system utilizes a responsive two-button touchpad controller with four-way scrolling.

 

Sandwiched between the power and speaker mute buttons located above the keyboard is a hot key for accessing the Lenovo Care portal, which launches multimedia applications, connects you to Web-based support services, and provides quick links to backup and system recovery tools.

 

The 15-inch XGA display is crisp and bright, but its 1024 x 768-pixel resolution can't compete with some of the high-res widescreen displays we're seeing in many of today's mainstream notebooks. If you're looking to play games, look elsewhere; the Lenovo turned in a predictably low score of 900 on our 3DMark03 benchmark tests with its Intel GMA 900 integrated graphics solution.

 

The C100 offers a solid mix of multimedia ports, although not all of them are easily accessed. Three USB, plus FireWire, S-Video, and VGA-out ports are all mounted on the rear of the system, along with a Fast Ethernet port. A single USB port and two audio jacks (headphone and microphone) are more conveniently located on the left side, as is a switch for the tri-mode wireless network adapter. The right side holds a PC Card slot and a 3-in-1 media card reader.

 

A slim dual-layer/multiformat DVD burner is mounted on the front of the system rather the side, which means you'll have to do some shifting to access the drive if you actually use this laptop on your lap. A pair of embedded speakers adequately play system sounds and music as long as you keep the volume below the halfway point. Beyond that the audio has too much treble and becomes slightly distorted.

 

Lenovo will configure the C100 with a variety of Pentium M or Celeron M processors; unfortunately, dual-core chips were not an option as of press time. Our review system came with a 1.73-GHz Intel Pentium M 740 processor, 512MB of DDR2 system memory (shared with the integrated Intel GMA 900 graphics adapter), and a 5,400-rpm 80GB hard drive.

 

The C100 is more than capable of handling everyday office and multimedia applications and notched a MobileMark 2005 score of 203, which is about average for this class of processor. More impressive is the C100's battery life; it lasted 5 hours and 2 minutes with the Wi-Fi turned on. Disabling the Wi-Fi gave us only three extra minutes of life, but we'll take it.  

 

In addition to the Lenovo Care tools, the C100 comes with Corel's Small Business Center suite with WordPerfect Office 12 and trial versions of CorelDraw Graphics and Presentations, Intervideo's WinDVD and WinDVD Creator, Roxio's DigitalMedia LE, PC Doctor, Diskeeper Lite, and a 90-day trial version of Norton Internet Security. Lenovo backs the 3000 family of notebooks with a one-year warranty covering parts and labor, and you get one year of 24/7 toll-free telephone support. Extended warranties are available for up to three years of protection, including options for next-business-day on-site service.

 

All in all, the Lenovo 3000 C100 is a capable, albeit plain-looking, mainstream notebook. If solid everyday performance and long battery life are important, it's certainly worth considering.