Pre-installed Software and Performance

Our ThinkPad Edge testing unit came with Windows seven Professional 64-bit, which is a pleasure to work with and complements the notebook nicely both in functionality and performance.

Given the fact that this is a business oriented notebook, Lenovo has configured it as such with an appropriate software packet. This includes a trial installer for Norton Net Security, a sixty-day trial offer of Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft AutoCollage 2009, Microsoft Windows Alive Essentials and Skype for Business. Thankfully there are no silly games or other useless applications pre-installed. Furthermore, the aforementioned programs were merely install files and weren't really loaded to the Bone, leaving that conclusion upwardly to the user.

There are a few programs that do come up pre-installed, however. The commencement is ThinkVantage Toolbox, which covers things like arrangement health, security, networking and diagnostics. I ultimately decided to uninstall this package equally I wouldn't exist using any of its features, but I tin can come across how some might exist handy for the boilerplate concern user.

Besides preinstalled are Admission Connections 5 and Ability Manager three, both Lenovo-branded programs that dock big graphic buttons on the taskbar showing wireless point strength and bombardment levels, respectively.

Power Manager defaults to a medium performance / energy saving setting. While this is all good and well, we should note that this setting underclocks the processor by lowering the multiplier from 6.5 to 4.0, resulting in a frequency subtract of 500 MHz down to a lowly 800MHz. Many newer notebooks and desktops feature power saving methods like to this, but what I found odd is how the system behaves when stressed.

Instead of dynamically clock the CPU back to stock speeds, no matter how much load was put on the system, it never budged from the lowered 800 MHz frequency. I can hands see the boilerplate user non being aware of this and wondering why their brand new notebook is performing much more than poorly than information technology should.

Below we have included a ready of criterion numbers and graphs from several tests that were run on the ThinkPad Edge to requite yous an idea of how its processor, hard drive and memory organisation perform nether load. All of these tests were run in high performance mode at the default CPU clock.

For our file transfer test we used two different ready of files. The first comprised 557 minor MP3 files amounting to ii.56GB in total. The second was a single 2.52GB .RAR file. The test consists simply of copying said files from i location on the hard bulldoze to another and measuring how long this process takes on each system.

The results above show an obvious advantage that the Border has thanks to its 7200RPM hard drive.

Next, nosotros converted fourteen 320Kbps MP3 files (119MB) to 128Kbps AAC and measured the time in seconds. For this test nosotros used iTunes version 9.0.iii in its 64-fleck edition when possible, 32-bit otherwise.

The Lenovo system is matched by the Acer Timeline which runs a single core processor, while the Averatec N3400 blows past the 2 thanks to its Pentium Dual Core CPU running at over 2 GHz.

Finally, we ran the 3DMark 2006 benchmark suite using an external monitor at 1280 ten 1024 with each system. While you lot are not going to be gaming much with Intel integrated graphics, the Lenovo outclasses the Averatec arrangement that runs a considerably faster processor. This will likely count on certain applications that can offload processing to the GPU.