On the outside, the N100 looks a lot like theLenovo ThinkPad Z60m. It has a silver lid that looks like the Z60m's titanium cover, but the shell is made entirely out of plastic. The 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 design is more polished than the C100's, and on the whole, the unit looks much nicer—especially the material surrounding the palm rests and screen. And like the C100, the N100 uses the patented ThinkPad keyboard, arguably the best keyboard on the market. But the N100 doesn't have the TrackPoint, another favorite of mine; however, the touchpad is responsive when you're navigating around the Web. And Lenovo could have done a better job with the mouse buttons. If you've ever worked on a ThinkPad, you know that its mouse buttons are noiseless and comfortable to use. That's not the case with the N100.
The N100 has four USB ports, a 4-in-1 card reader, a 100GB hard drive, and a fingerprint reader. Instead of the ThinkVantage blue button found on ThinkPads, which launches the ThinkVantage suite, 3000 series laptops have the Lenovo Care suite—essentially a lighter version of ThinkVantage. 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. ( ThinkPads have both.)
With a 1.67-GHz Core Duo T2300 and 512MB RAM, the N100 is a moderately better performer than the Z60m, which runs on a single-core Pentium M. On our performance tests, its overall SYSmark 2004 SE scores were 13 percent higher than the Z60m's, and it was 24 percent better on Internet Content Creation. The best overall scores for notebooks on this suite still belong to the Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi, our Editors' Choice, but that system has better components than the N100. Battery life hovers around average, scoring 2 hours and 44 minutes on MobileMark 2005 tests.
So if you're looking for a fast Lenovo widescreen notebook, the N100 is your best bet. ( I would upgrade the memory to 1GB if the graphics were integrated, but the N100 comes with discrete graphics, albeit the entry-level nVidia GeForce Go 7300.)
The N100 might give some big players ( Acer, Dell, and HP) a run for their money. It offers configurations comparable with theirs for under $1, 400, and the system is well suited to the home, school, or even small businesses just starting out.
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