Digital Trends

Lenovo 3000 V100 June 7th, 2006 | by Alan Dang

Software/Technical Support

Another hallmark of the IBM ThinkPad line is its ThinkVantage software bundle and world-class technical support.   The Lenovo V100 adopts the best of these features.

First of all, Lenovo laptops ship with "Lenovo Care," which includes the ThinkVantage "Rescue and Recovery" application. This allows you boot into a  protected environment and recover your data files even when if operating system fails to boot. After recovering your critical data, you can then use the built-in system restore to recover your system from an older backup. 

The ability to recover data without going into Windows is great, but what's even better about the System Restore feature is that unlike competing solutions such as Norton Ghost, Lenovo Care doesn't require that you completely wipe the hard drive clean and start fresh. You can selectively restore Windows XP to  a fresh install while preserving your added data files, bookmarks, and personal settings, or choose to clean up the Windows registry. Of course, you have the option to completely wipe the drive clean to factory-spec. You can even create your own backup images onto an external USB HDD, or even a networked drive, and later restore from those locations. The whole point of Lenovo Care is to help you recover and troubleshoot your computer instead of having to send it in.

But suppose something does go horribly wrong and you need replacements parts or an opportunity to talk with a technical support specialist. Tech support for  the Lenovo V100 is handled by IBM Service and Support... which is key.  This means that when you have a problem during business hours, your call typically gets routed to IBM's call center in Atlanta — not somewhere overseas. IBM Service specialists will be able to help you with your system.  Know which part you need replaced? Just give the call center the FRU number and they'll take care of the rest.  It may sound like a hyperbole, but service and support with  the Lenovo V100 is indeed a dream come true. Expert users can get things taken care of quickly and efficiently, and novices can talk with an expert when they need to.

The Lenovo V100 also includes a full version of Corel WordPerfect 12. WordPerfect is a great word processor if you're working alone, but if you need to read complex documents produced by Microsoft Word users, OpenOffice might be a better alternative.  Still, almost everything you write in WordPerfect will translate to Microsoft Word very well.  In fact, WordPerfect is the 2nd most popular office suite, with a marketshare of about 15% (though this includes copies of Word Perfect bundled with systems such as the Lenovo V100).  Diskeeper Lite is a disk defragmentation software that helps keep your system running fast. The bundled Norton Anti-Virus and Internet Security software is good, but it only offers a brief subscription to the protection updates.

The BisonCam software intended for use with the webcam seems to have been written as a engineering test application rather than something normal people are supposed to use. You have to  manually determine how much space to pre-allocate (in MB) for the capture file. If you didn't pre-allocate enough space the first time and decide to change the amount to pre-allocate before you choose a new filename, you'll lose that first video.  If none of that made sense to you, don't worry -- that's exactly why BisomCam is so bad. If  that made sense to you, then yeah... that's exactly why BisonCam is so bad.  It's really a shame really, since the camera itself is very high quality.