Lenovo 3000 N100 Review

Lenovo 3000 N100

The Lenovo 3000 N100 will make a good impression on consumers, giving them good processing power, a nice set of features, all for a very competitive price.

On the outside, the Lenovo 3000 N100 looks a lot like the Lenovo ThinkPad Z60m. It has a silver lid that looks like the Z60m's titanium cover, but the Lenovo 3000 N100shell is made entirely out of plastic. the Lenovo 3000 N100 weighs 6.1 pounds, which isn't too heavy to tote around. The transflective 15.4-inch widescreen is excellent for images and well suited to multimedia tasks such as video and photo editing.

The Lenovo 3000 N100 has four USB ports, a 4-in-1 card reader, a 100GB hard drive, and a fingerprint reader. Instead of the Think-Vantage blue button found on Think-Pads, which launches the Think-Vantage suite, 3000 series laptops have the Lenovo Care suite—essentially a lighter version of Think-Vantage. You still get utilities such as Access Connections and Rescue and Recovery, but you don't get the advanced Client Security tools or little things like Away Manager (Automating system tasks) and Whisper Mode (a system resource manager). Though there's a fingerprint reader, there is no TPM chip (a hardware chip built in for an added level of security) and no Active Protection, which protects your hard drive from sudden drops or bumps.

With a 1.67-GHz Core Duo T2300 and 512MB RAM, the Lenovo 3000 N100 is a moderately better performer than the Z60m, which runs on a single-core Pentium M. The Lenovo 3000 N100 was surpassingly quiet for a notebook of this spec.

So if you're looking for a fast Lenovo widescreen notebook, the Lenovo 3000 N100 is your best bet. (I would upgrade the memory to 1GB if the graphics were integrated, but the Lenovo 3000 N100 comes with discrete graphics, albeit the entry-level nVidia GeForce Go 7300.)

The Lenovo 3000 N100 will sure give the big players such as Acer, Dell, and HP a run for their money. It offers configurations comparable with theirs and the system is well suited to the home, school, or even small businesses just starting out. I can't really fault the Lenovo 3000 N100, I ran it for 2 weeks with no problems at all, a minor annoyance was the quality of the mouse buttons, but they were still perfectly usable.