Business all rounder
The Lenovo 3000 C200 is blatantly business-oriented. If the conservative styling doesn’t give it away, the 4:3 aspect ratio screen with anti-glare matte finish should — both of which are traits that predominate in work-issue laptops. Plus, it runs Windows Vista Business.
Lenovo’s 3000 series is typified by the excellent Lenovo Care suite of systems diagnostic and maintenance software that comes preinstalled, making them a good choice for small-business users that don’t have the luxury of their own IT staff.
But home users will also find value in this offering, even if it isn’t great for multimedia — the 80GB hard drive is on the small side, and the non-wide-screen display, limited viewing angles and underpowered speakers put a dampener on watching movies.
Like the other two sub-$1,000 notebooks, the C200 runs a Celeron chip clocked at 1.73GHz, but it’s the slower 430 chipset paired to 512MB of RAM and integrated Intel GMA 950 graphics. As such, performance isn’t anything to write home about — it wasn’t able to run 3DMark06, and a PCMark05 score of 1,666 placed it towards the bottom of the pack.