Lenovo W700

As reported, I recently bought a Lenovo S10e which is tiny and I love it. At the same time I also bought a Lenovo W700. As a sentence, that doesn’t sound funny but a picture is worth 1,024 words: 



The W700 is the thick end of 2,400 GBP, another somewhat amusing contrast, because that makes it about an order of magnitude more expensive than the S10e. How can it possible be worth that?

Well, while the S10e is all about being small, cute and cuddly, none of these adjectives can be applied to the W700. I can (just) fit the S10e in a large pocket – OK technically a poacher’s pocket in a jacket, but it does fit.

If I carry the W700 under my arm, the top of the machine is comfortably tucked into my armpit, the other is comfortably in my hand. I use the term “comfortably” here to imply a good fit between the two– not to describe the pain as my arm is slowly pulled out of its socket by the 8.5 Lbs. (Or 3.3 Kg).

But it’s horses for courses: the W700 is not destined to travel the world – think of it as a workstation (that’s what the W stands for) that can be moved without recourse to a Land Rover. And this isn’t just any old workstation, this is a serious bit of kit.

For example, we all know that Vista is a performance killer. So much so that Microsoft even provides test software (Control Panel, Performance Information and Tools) that will assess your hardware and give it a Windows Experience Index. The highest possible score in each category is 5.9 which the W700 effortlessly achieves in every category. It’s not surprising. For example the graphics card is a NVIDIA NB9E-GLM3 (1GB) and the screen is an expansive 17 inches with a resolution of 1,920 * 1,200.

The W700 has two 7,200 RPM disks that are RAIDed together as RAID 0. This RAID level doesn’t add redundancy it simply increases speed. Each file is essentially split into two and half is written to each disk. During read/write operations the file can be read faster because the process utilises two I/O streams instead of one.

So the question is, who needs a stonking graphics card and very fast disk access on a machine that can be portable? The Lenovo answer is graphical designers, photo editors and so on. Hence the digitising pad that is built into the write rest (there’s plenty of room) and the automatic colour calibration.

Now I am not a graphical designer, I’m a database freak. Well, someone has to be, but why am I so interested in the W700? Well, databases aren’t what they used to be. I’m involved in several projects now where the image store massively outweighs the volume of text. The whole point of the database is that users need to be able to see very high quality images and manipulate them.

This machine (did I mention the 64 bit, quad core Intel QX9300 processor?) is as powerful as many servers, doubles as a very high quality graphical workstation and is portable. So, for some specific applications this is the perfect machine.

So, please feel free to try this at home but not on an aeroplane…

W700.jpg One smaller than a trader’s conscience, the other larger than his bonus.