Digital Trends

Lenovo 3000 V200 August 7th, 2007 | by Josh Norem

OS situation

The V200 is offered with Vista Ultimate, end of discussion. Whether it’s worth it or not is hard to say, because for some reason Lenovo shipped us the system with Vista Business installed.

The Touchpad

Unlike a ThinkPad, the V200 does not include the little red TrackPoint controller, which is fine by us. We prefer a touchpad, and the V200’s is very good, if a bit small. We found it to be very accurate, and the soft-touch left-and-right click buttons never gave us any hassles either. The touchpad also features the ability to scroll up and down on a page. You just click anywhere on the page, then drag your finger up and down the right-side of the touchpad to move the page. This feature can get in the way sometimes, when you are trying to move the cursor and the whole page moves instead, but we never experienced this issue and think the touchpad works very well in all situations.

The V200 keyboard

Biometric security

Like its ThinkPad brethren, the V200 includes a biometric fingerprint scanner that can be used in a number of ways. You can use it to log into Windows, to resume your session after going into hibernation, or to link it to passwords on sites that require a log-in. However, we found the password manager to be unpredictable. At times it would require us to swipe our finger prior to logging into a site, which is great. If you have a password stored on your Gmail account, for example, and someone steals your computer, they would not be able to log-in using your saved password. However, on other sites it would either not save the password, or not do anything at all when we logged in and logged out. Of course, the fact that you have to use a fingerprint swipe to log-in to Windows sort of negates these issues, but in general we found the password manager to be a bit too unpredictable for our tastes.

Fingerprint manager screenshot

Storage

The unit we received for review includes a 120GB 5400rpm hard drive, which is a decent amount of space. It seems fast enough to our hands and eyes, as most applications opened within a second or two. Most of this “speed” is due to Vista’s Ready Boost feature, which tracks which applications you use most frequently and loads their boot files into system memory. And according to the Lenovo website, this system is now shipping with a 160GB drive, which is awesome.

Unlike the ThinkPad line of notebooks, however, the V200 does not ship with hard drive shock protection.

Wireless

Remember how we said the V200 has the new Intel chipset? One of the other benefits of said chipset is the Intel wireless chip supports A, B, G and the new and yet-to-be-ratified N standard, which offers up to six times more bandwidth than 80211.G. We set up a wireless N network care of a D-Link 660 Limited Edition router, and set it to broadcast at N speeds only. The V200 connected to it and reported the connection speed as 144mbps, as opposed to the 54mbps you get with 80211.G. We decided to perform a basic file transfer speed test to see if N is all that, and it definitely is all that and a bag of chips. Transferring a 253MB file at G speeds took 1:54 seconds. The same transfer at N speeds took just 41 seconds.

Suffice to say, the V200 has the latest and greatest in wireless, including support for Bluetooth. Even if the N spec won’t be ratified for awhile, it’s useful today.