Product Reviews

Lenovo's 3000 N100 is a widescreen budget laptop. According to its manufacturer, the N100 is designed to make mobile computing easy, secure and inexpensive. It's certainly inexpensive and we haven't seen many new widescreen laptops that cost as little as £636. But Lenovo hasn't been able to keep prices this low without making some compromises.

Safe and sound

Like the Toshiba laptop on page 32, the 3000 N100 has a built-in finger print reader. This supplements Windows password protection, allowing you either to enter your Windows password or swipe your finger to gain entry to the PC. Usefully, you can also use the fingerprint reader to encrypt and protect individual files and folders, so you'll need to use the reader in order to open any documents that you've protected this way even when you've logged in.

The N100 also comes with the useful and well-designed Lenovo Care software. This means that you can access essential system settings in one place, which makes it easy to restore either individual files or the whole system should you lose data, or your operating system be corrupted. This may not sound like an exciting feature now, but think how glad you'll be to have it if something does go wrong.

At first glance,

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the N100 looks as if it has some good features for a laptop that costs under £700. It has an 80GB hard disk, it weighs only 2.78kg and has a widescreen display that's perfect for watching DVD movies. For only £60 more though, you can buy the Dell Inspiron 6400 reviewed in our July issue. The Dell is also a widescreen laptop and its specification includes a dual-core Intel processor instead of the single-core chip used in this system. As you'd expect, the Dell did much better in our benchmarks. Unsurprisingly, the Lenovo wouldn't even run our 3D gaming benchmarks. The quality of the screen also left us cold. Yes, it has a widescreen aspect ratio, but it's not very bright and images look rather flat and dull - not what you want when you're watching a movie. The speakers are also particularly puny, even for a laptop.

Unappealing design

Build quality is reasonable, although the screen flexes noticeably. Aesthetics are naturally a matter of personal taste, but we find it hard to believe that many people are going to like this unattractive retro look that reminds us of an 80s' home computer.

The battery lasted for 3 hours and 40 minutes in our light use battery test - that's actually a very good score. In our DVD rundown test, the battery lasted for 2 hours and 13 minutes - again, not bad, certainly long enough to watch most DVD movies. The bendiness of the screen aside, the N100 is sturdy enough to stand up to the rigours of life on the road.

The N100 isn't a bad laptop, it has a large hard disk for its price, is sturdy and has a good batttery life. Unfortunately it's not that powerful. While it will run everyday software it won't cope well with demanding tasks such as photo editing. If you shop around you can get more for your money, for instance the Dell Inspiron 6400 that we reviewed in our July issue.