Lenovo IdeaCentre 600: Thinnest (Hottest?) All-in-One PC on the Block

By matt buchanan

Lenovo's IdeaCentre 600 is a pretty splashy debut: Its first ever all-in-one is a simple curved slab that's supposedly the thinnest all-in-one in the industry.

Beyond the form factor—which borrows liberally from the new Star Trek and the iMac (the frameless black bezel looks like it was copy and pasted)—it's actually a disappointingly standard all-in-one affair, with a smallish 21.5-inch screen and nothing you can't get on the new Vaio LV. And it's missing, at least from the spec sheet, one of the Vaio's killer features—HDMI in, which would let it be a total bedroom TV replacement. Still, it does have an awesome Swiss Army knife of a remote—it's an air mouse, accelerometer controller for games and Skype VOIP handset (it acts like a cordless phone).

It starts at $999, but all the cool stuff (like Blu-ray) is add-ons, so it'll probably get pricey pretty fast.

IdeaCentre A600 All-in-One Desktop

Lenovo brings consumers the next generation of desktop computing with the IdeaCentre A600 – Lenovo’s first all-in-one desktop. The new, sleek IdeaCentre A600 all-in-one features a 21.5-inch frameless screen, and provides discerning space-conscious and style-conscious users a modern design that measures only one inch at its slimmest point, making it the slimmest all-in-one in the industry2.

For the entertainment enthusiast, the all-in-one offers a true Hi-Def experience featuring a 16:9 aspect ratio screen for cinema-like viewing and support for 1920x1080 full HD resolution delivering outstanding image quality. The integrated speaker system includes a bass sub-woofer and Dolby® Home Theatre™ audio certification, while the optional Blu-ray player completes the home cinema experience. Users can also take advantage of a digital TV tuner for watching and recording their favorite TV programs. Users can opt to include the Microsoft Vista Media Center for easy recording of TV programs and interactive navigation between videos, music and TV programs.

For gaming enthusiasts, Lenovo developed the first-of-its-kind 4-in-1 optional remote controller. It is the first to bring PC users the ability to play games using the remote control’s ‘motion drive’ feature, which controls on-screen objects according to the movement of the remote.

Unlike competitor’s remotes, the Lenovo 4-in-1 remote controller can also be used as a VOIP handset3 to make and receive phone calls over the Internet, similar to a typical cordless telephone. The remote also serves as a media center/TV remote, and with Microsoft Vista Media Center users can use the controller to operate DVDs, movies and TV. Additionally, the remote also functions as an “air mouse” so it can be used to operate the cursor on the screen, eliminating the inconvenience of using a wired mouse.

At the core of the all-in-one is a powerful desktop computer with choices of Intel® Core™2 Duo processors, optional ATI Radeon™ graphics card technology with DirectX10 support, up to 4GB of fast DDR3 memory for improved multitasking, and up to 1TB (1000GB) of hard drive space for storing hundreds of videos, music and other documents. Equipped with the latest high-performance mobile processor technology, the all-in-one runs whisper-quiet even when performing intensive tasks.

The IdeaCentre A600 all-in-one offers several connectivity options including high-speed WiFi, a 6-in-1 media card reader, side-mounted USB and FireWire ports with additional USB ports on the rear of the panel. The all-in-one also features VeriFace™ facial recognition technology which allows users to use his/her facial image as the logon password.

IdeaCentre A600

21.5-inch frameless screen, full HD resolution 1920 X 1080 resolution

Intel Pentium Dual Core & Intel Core 2 Duo mobile processors

Intel G45M Chipset

DDR3 1066MHz, 1GB-4GB and up to 1 TB (1,000 GB) of HD space

Integrated graphics with support for DirectX10 , Optional DX10 256M OR 512M OR ATI graphics

Connectivity – Intel a/b/g Optional a/b/g/n, Ethernet

VeriFace 3.5 facial recognition

Dolby Home Theatre

Optional Blu-Ray DVD player

Optional hybrid analogue/digital TV tuner

Touch sensitive controls

Optional 4-in-1 remote control

6-in-1 card reader

6 USB 2.0 ports and 1 firewire (1394)

1.3 or 2 megapixel camera

Vista Premium, Vista Basic

WinDVD （for Blu-ray ODD), Motion drive games, Veri-face 3.5, PC Care 1.1, Rescue System 2.0 (OKR5.7), Live tool bar, Power2Go, Windows Home Premium SP1 32 , Home Basic SP 1 32bit

Dealzmodo Hacks: 8 Ways To Get More Miles Out Of Your Old PC

By John Mahoney

Before you drop the dough on a whole new system, here's a list of upgrades for squeezing a few more months, years even, out of ol' faithful, during these trying economic times.

If your Windows PC is seriously Dark Ages material, you might want to try converting it into something altogether different, like an NAS or media center. But stick around here if you're riding that thin line between acceptable day-to-day use and the scrap heap and try these quick and cheap upgrades first.

1. Reinstall Your OS
Over the years, operating systems inevitably pick up random pieces of clutter that start hogging your limited resources and bring your system to its knees. Forget spyware and malware cleaners—they're often just as guilty of mucking up your machine.

No, the best way to start fresh is of course to reinstall Windows. It's a pain, but thankfully there are a number of tools that will make the process easier.

• nLite and vLite for XP and Vista respectively are great tools for not only automating a large chunk of the reinstall process, but also for slimming down and customizing the installation to make sure you have a version of Windows that's optimized for your old hardware

• Kevin from Lifehacker also has a great guide for slipstreaming XP Service Pack 3 onto a custom install disc so you can avoid hundreds of Windows Update downloads after you reinstall using the older XP disc you probably have lying around.

• There are a ton of tools to help back up your data before a reinstall, but an easy no-brainer (especially if things have gotten so bad that you can't boot) is to boot with a Linux live CD like Ubuntu and move your files from your Windows volume to an external drive before wiping it.

2. Buy a New Graphics Card
A huuuuge part of what we humans perceive as slowness while using a computer are delays and hang-ups in the graphical UI—something that doubling or quadrupling your available video memory and beefing up your GPU rendering muscle will go a long way in alleviating. Graphics cards are super cheap these days, so think about dropping $100 or less on a new video card for your system and see where that gets you before going full monty on the replacement. As you probably well know, Newegg is the place for cheap hardware—for $150 or less you can do very well with a variation on the solid Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT or ATI Radeon HD 4850.

3. Max Our Your RAM
Many of you may be saying "duhhh" here but this can't be more of an important point—if you haven't maxed out your RAM yet, do it. Now. Just like graphics cards, RAM is super cheap, especially if you're running a common motherboard configuration. So head to Crucial or OWC, have it scan your system, and price out some new RAM sticks for you. Remember—matched pairs (in terms of size) are always faster than unmatched, and to taste every last bit of a 4GB upgrade, you'll need a 64-bit OS.

4. Get a Bigger Display
This one is more of head game than an actual upgrade, but I swear, every time I hook my laptop up to the big 22" widescreen monitor here in the office, my machine feels about a year or two faster. Something about having more screen real estate just helps. Plus, once you do finally get a brand new screamer, you can just swap it right over. Cheap LCDs are our daily Dealzmodo Roundups bread and butter, so keep an eye out there for a good bargain on a decent brand.

5. Get a Bigger, Faster Hard Drive
You can never have too much storage. So abiding by this rule, a few bucks spent on a new HD will at the very least free up more space for virtual memory on your boot volume. You could also look at a 10,000RPM drive for a desktop or a 7,200RPM drive for your laptop, which will undoubtedly be faster than your stock drive. Don't worry so much about your new HDD's cache size so long as its at least 8MB (which is common), as anything higher tends to offer diminishing returns. For everything else you'd want to know and more about getting a new hard drive, check out yesterday's Giz Explains on HDDs.

6. Optimize Your Boot Time
Another psychological downer is waiting 5 minutes for your machine to boot. Again, Lifehacker to the rescue: Less than a month ago, Gina published a complete guide to streamlining your Windows startup speed—make that your first stop.

7. Clean Out Your Browser
Your web browser is where you spend most of your time—and just like Windows, Firefox can get bogged down in bloat. If you have a ton of extensions installed that you never use, disable or remove them. You can also dive into the world of about:config and follow the numerous guides to tweaking FF's guts for more speed. Opinions on whether these are real or placebo is mixed, but even so, there are a lot of cool things you can do.

You can also make the leap to Firefox 3.1 (still in beta) with its drastically sped-up TraceMonkey rendering engine. Here is a guide for safely playing with the Firefox 3.1 beta without touching your Firefox 3 profile.

And if you're using Internet Explorer, um, stop it.

8. Ditch Windows Entirely
If things are really dire (on the money or performance front, or both) you might want to think about making a switch to Linux—especially if your main PC usage entails not much more than your typical web browsing, emailing, IMing and media playing/managing. There are a million and half tutorials out there for switching to Linux (Ubuntu's own is pretty good), which will almost certainly run considerably faster on your hardware than Windows does.

Special thanks to the Lifehacker folks for just doing what you're doing.

Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.

Giz Explains: Everything You Need to Know About Hard Drives

By matt buchanan,

Some say that the end of the trusty hard drive is near, killed by SSD. But let's not be so quick to give up on a technology that stores a whole terabyte for $100.

It'll be years before solid-state flash-memory disks (in this case usually referred to as SSDs) let us cheaply bank the same amounts of data as trusty old hard disk drives for a reasonable price. So, you might as well know how they work, 'cause honestly, they'll have a place on or next to your desk holding all the crap that won't fit on daintier solid state drives—HD movies, huge pictures, music and who knows what else if you're Jason Chen.

What Goes on Inside
The reason hard drive is abbreviated as HDD is that it's really a hard disk drive. Inside you've got what's called a "platter," which is a magnetized recording surface that spins around really really fast, with a head that zooms across the disk to read and write data, think kinda like a record player, except that the head never actually touches the disk except, as you will see below, when bad things happen. [Image via Wikipedia]

Hard drives also come in a few different sizes, with 1.8", 2.5" and 3.5" being the most common, but they've been bigger (and smaller). 3.5" is for desktops, 2.5" is for notebooks (or obsessively quiet desktops), and 1.8" is what goes in classic iPods, MacBook Airs and other small portable devices.

The more platters a drive has, the more data it can hold, but most advances in storage have focused on increasing storage density. A really high-capacity drive can have four platters, while many 3.5" desktop models and some elite laptop 2.5" drives have three platters. Most laptop drives and all the 1.8" portable-device drives that we know of are limited to two platters.

The real catalyst for those 1TB and 1.5TB monster drives pooped out by Hitachi and Seagate wasn't platter stacking, though. It was perpendicular magnetic recording, which allows for triple storage density by storing data vertically (or perpendicularly) along the platter's recording layer, rather than spreading it out across it horizontally (parallel-ly?). However, data is more fragile and susceptible to erasure when stored vertically, hence the slow creep in precision allowing for greater storage densities and capacities.

What All Those Numbers and Letters Mean
You might've noticed hard drives are often labeled as IDE or SATA or PATA or PITA (kidding), with specs like 5400RPM or 7200RPM, plus they come in various sizes, like 1.8, 2.5 or 3.5-inches. Confusing, no? So here's all that crap means.

RPM means the same thing it does in cars, rotations revolutions per minute. In hard drives it's important because the faster the disk spins, the faster it can read and write data. 7200RPM is the standard for desktop drives, but performance models run at 10,000RPM or 15,000RPM. Notebook drives typically run at 5400RPM, because they're smaller, but recently, you can order them with 7200RPM to get more performance at the cost of battery life.

A higher RPM is the single greatest performance variable, since the faster it spins, the more data it can read or write within whatever time frame—it also makes access faster, since the head doesn't have to wait as long to pass over the right data once it's moved to the right spot. And a faster (lower) seek time, basically, refers to how long it takes for the drive to move its head where it needs to go to read or write data. High end drives have a seek time of just 2ms, while typical consumer drives are close to 9ms. Also, the higher the buffer—most typically 8, 16 or 32MB—the more data it can pre-cache, though Tom's Hardware found that you getdiminishing returns there.

How They Connect
The various kinds of drives essentially refers to how it interfaces or connects with your computer's motherboard. There are a bunch, but only a few worth knowing. Up until the last few years, the dominant standard was ATA, or Advanced Technology Attachment. Once SATA, or serial ATA, came onto the map (more on that in a sec), regular ATA picked up the alternative name parallel ATA.

Further revisions to the ATA spec allowed for hard drives with greater storage and faster transfer speeds, and you might see drives using the later spec revisions called "Ultra ATA" or something similar, and they can transfer data at 133MBps (which is slooooow). ATA drives are commonly called IDE (integrated drive electronics), but ATA is more precise. If you've ever messed around inside a computer, you'd recognize them because they connected to fatass ribbon cables that take up a lot of room. The third major interface, which you should know of, but not necessarily about, is SCSI (pronounced "scuzzy"), which was primarily used in the enterprise or high-end space when ATA was still king. The ATA/IDE interface also confused some with its master/slave assignations, which, as you'll see, is no longer a problem.

Okay, so the current hard drive standard in consumer PCs as of a few years ago is SATA, which is worlds better than ATA. For one, it's faster—first-gen devices ran at 1.5Gbps, but now they're up to 3Gbps, and are on the road to hitting 6Gbps. Also, their cables are way thinner, for better air flow and less tangly crap inside your case. And because they're smarter and don't depend on a lot of configuration, they're easy to work with, and are even hot-swappable. Newer external drives use a variant of SATA, eSATA (e for external) that essentially just moves the port to the outside of the computer case, delivering SATA speed for peripherals. Soon, eSATA will come in a bus-powered format, much like the smaller portable USB drives you see today.

Fast seek times are different than fast transfer times from a good interface—one pertains to how quickly the data can be located on the disk, and the other is how fast it can be sent over. To describe it in somewhat oversimplified terms, you can see how a slow interface on a fast seek drive would be better for a system that's constantly shifting tiny bits of data, where a fast interface on a relatively slower drive is good for moving really large files around.

Why They Die
Remember how I said the head usually never touches the drive's platter surface? When the head actually does touch the drive platter, it's what's called a head crash (check out the video above), and it means you're skee-rewed. Normally the head flies on a tiny pocket of air, but a single particle can make the head bounce on the disk, totally hosing the magnetic layer, especially at higher RPMs. And it just gets worse from there, because stuff scraped away by a head crash making it more likely that more head crashes will happen. More mundanely, the delicate mechanical parts eventually just wear out over time, which is typically measured by the the drive's rated mean time between failures. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot you can do to predict when your drive is gonna go down in flames, unless you bought a drive from a series suffering manufacturing defects.

So what is really the single most important thing you should know about hard drives? Back your crap up, they may be awesome, but that doesn't mean they're without weakness.

Something you still wanna know? Send any questions about drives, personal storage or other hard things to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

Why You Should Stop Buying Your Computers Fully Loaded

By Sean Fallon,

Hard economic times require that we think more closely about how our money is spent. When it comes to computers, Prof. Dealzmodo has a philosophy: build it and values will come.

In other words, it makes more financial sense to buy the most basic model at a bargain-basement price and turn it into the top-notch computer of your dreams. It can save you hundreds and maybe even thousands of dollars overall.

Laptops: I visited Dell.com and selected a mid-range laptop—in this case, the Studio 17. A model with 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive will run you $799— but what happens when you want to beef it up with some extra RAM and an even bigger hard drive? Just like that, the price shoots up to $1049 for the following configuration (if you stick with Dell hardware upgrades):

Dell Studio 17

• 2.0GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core T3200
• 4GB DDR2 RAM
• 640GB (2x320) SATA Hard Drive (5400 RPM)
• Integrated graphics

However, a quick trip to Newegg to pick up RAM and an additional 320GB drive brings the total down to $918 for the same computer. Basically, I just shaved $131 off the price by doing these simple upgrades myself.

Note: On any system, to make use of all 4GB of RAM, you need 64-bit Windows. You should get it at no extra charge when configuring a system, so be sure to ask up front. Buying an extra copy separately for will cost you a punitive $100.

Before you settle on a laptop, make sure that you check to see what can be upgraded and whether or not you can find easily exchangeable parts at a discount. And keep in mind that savings could be increased even further if you start with a refurbished model or a model that is not loaded with an OS.

Desktops: We all know that desktops, much less custom-built desktops, are not highly sought after these days. Still, the tremendous values here are hard to ignore. PC Gamers are well acquainted with the practice, but I see no reason (outside of the need for portability) why budget shoppers can't take advantage of the savings as well. Once again, I chose a mid-range product from Dell as the control—the Studio desktop.

Example #1 (A Studio configuration straight from the Dell website):

•2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E7300
• 24" Widescreen HD LCD
• 4GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
• 1TB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
• ATI Radeon HD 3650 256MB GPU
• 16X DVD+/-RW Drive
• Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio
• Vista Home Premium

Total Cost: $1464

Example #2 (A Studio configuration with custom-installed parts):

Base model
• 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E7300
• No monitor
• 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM
• 500GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
• Integrated graphics
• 16X DVD+/-RW Drive
• Integrated Audio
• Windows Vista Premium

Add custom parts:
• 4GB DDR2 SDRAM for $40
• 24" Asus Widescreen HD LCD for $300
• 1TB Seagate Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) for $110
• Radeon HD 3650 256MB GPU for $55
• Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio for $50

Total Cost of Base Model: $749
Upgrades: $555
Total Cost Overall: $1304

As with the laptop, by simply upgrading components myself I managed to save cash—in this case, $160—and I have an extra 500GB drive to boot.

Example #3 (Total custom build):

• Cooler Master Case with 460W Power Supply for $90
• 24" Asus Widescreen HD LCD for $300
• 1TB Seagate Serial ATA Hard Drive for $110
• Lite-On 20x DVD+/-RW Drive for $21
• Radeon HD 3650 256MB GPU for $55
• Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Audio for $50
• Basic keyboard for $5
• Basic mouse for $5
• 4GB DDR2 SDRAM for $42
• Motherboard for $45
• 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 for $120
• Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit for $100

Total Cost of Build: $943

By building from scratch, I was able put together the same computer (in terms of performance) as the Dell Studio in the first example for $521 less—and the majority of the components are better. I also saved an extra $361 over the upgrade to the base Studio model in example #2.

It is also important to note that making upgrades on laptops and factory desktops can void your warranty. This may be something you want to check on before proceeding. You may also want to investigate local businesses that specialize in custom builds if you lack the skills necessary to make the upgrades yourself. Even though these services are an added expense, you are still likely to come out on top.

Conclusion: The bottom line is that saving money on a computer is more than just finding the best deal online. In this case, it's kind of like buying a fixer-upper. When you walk into the property the realtor tries to help you focus on what the home could be as opposed to what it currently is. Again, before you buy, make sure to check and see if doing some of the upgrades yourself can help you save some extra money. In order to maintain continuity and keep things simple, I stuck with Dell and Newegg here—but, obviously, branching out could lead to greater savings. You could also save a lot more if you are willing to make a sacrifice or two here and there—like going with AMD over Intel (although I doubt many Intel fans would be willing to make that jump no matter what the cost).

Prof. Dealzmodo is a regular section dedicated to helping budget-minded consumers learn how to shop smarter and get the best deals on their favorite gadgets. If you have any topics you would like to see covered, send your idea to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Professor Dealzmodo" in the subject line.