Lenovo A61e  

Smart Design, Spartan Features

The cabinet’s largest dimension is less than one foot! And with a height of 8 cm, this PC can be placed anywhere, literally. Thanks to the solid build quality, you can even place the monitor on the cabinet on a really cramped desk.

There are two USB ports and an audio in and out in the front. Four more USB connectors are on the rear panel, but two of them will be occupied by a keyboard and mouse as there are no PS/2 ports. There is no Firewire either. The only other connectivity is the three audio ports at the back panel. This is a machine intended for business use and the connectivity and features are just enough to ‘get the work done’ and nothing more. Gigabit LAN connectivity helps in faster transfers of huge files in offices.

The supplied keyboard is neither soft touch nor tactile per se; but it does take a bit of effort to press the keys which is usually the case with tactile keyboards. For business users who may need to spend a lot of time typing, a more tactile feedback would have been preferable. The mouse, on its part, in typical IBM / Lenovo fashion, is solid and is big enough to easily fit into the palm. The feel and the response are good and most users should not find this a problem.

Lenovo has done away with a CPU fan for A61e, thanks to the smart choice of going for a CPU that consumes less power and produces less heat and using a large passive heat sink. The optional 19 inch wide screen monitor is bright, color neutral and shows a slight red tinge only when viewed at wide angles.

The small motherboard in the A61e uses 200 pin laptop RAM rather than the usual 240 pin DDR2 that regular desktops use. So, upgrading will be slightly more expensive.

Modest Performance

A WorldBench 6.0 score of 63 will not take the A61e to any performance podium, but it indicates that the machine is capable of carrying the load of a typical office user. Office Suites, browsing and e-mail will all be easily possible, with some music running in the background. Similarly, a PC Mark 2005 score of 3027 places it slightly below an average desktop. But these won’t pose problems for its intended office tasks.

The CPU powering the A61e is the Athlon X2 BE-2350 (2.1 GHz, 1MB L2 cache) which is a lower power consuming version of the dual core AMD Athlon X2 family.

RAM is 1GB DDR2 in the test sample we received, but Lenovo’s website mentioned only 512MB as on the date of this review. So before buying, check on the RAM as this can seriously affect performance. Graphics is handled by the ATI X1200 on a motherboard that uses the RS690 chip.

Verdict

Given its size and noise free operation, it’d have been great if Lenovo had included an HDMI or S-video out – this could have doubled up as a work-cum-entertainment PC at home. But, we really can’t fault Lenovo for this as the company has clearly marked this for a business audience. In its default configuration consisting of 512MB RAM, no monitor and only DOS 2000 as the OS, it costs Rs. 16,700. With a 19-inch wide screen monitor, 1 GB RAM and Vista Business, the price goes up to Rs. 40,000.