My review of this PC is from a slightly different perspective. I have purchased this as a second PC. The slightly different perspective is in the fact that I purchased this second hand, although it is only three weeks old. A friend of mine purchased the PC new for £400 and found himself very disappointed with his choice. Having more money than sense, he sold me the PC for an extremely knocked down price of £250.
For the price original price of £400 paid I can quite understand his disappointment and the reasons for which I will outline further.
I will start with the CPU or better know as the processor. The A55 9265 is fitted with an Intel Pentium 4 - 541. Whilst this is not a bad CPU in its own right, it is far from being up to date by other manufactures standards. Rated at 2.8Ghz, the standard for most even those price
significantly lower than Lenovo is 3Ghz upwards. Quite how the ThinkCentre A55 hopes to even try to compete with other manufacturers offering 3-4Ghz CPU's with a price tag of around £50 less is somewhat of a mystery. Having said that, as my mate has proven with flying colours.."there is one born every minute"
The memory installed is on a par with most budget PC's and is supplied with 512Mb DDR II SDRAM. Thankfully memory these days is a relatively cheap upgrade option.
The hard drive installed again is somewhat below acceptable for the price tag. The A55 is supplied with an 80Gb hard drive. Although this size of drive is acceptable, for £400 you would expect something around 100 -120Gb in size.
The graphics card is on-board as is the norm with all budget PC's. The graphics memory is shared with the PC's RAM and is adjustable via the PC's Bios settings. The graphics memory can be increased up to 128Mb, however baring in mind that the PC is only supplied with 512Mb to start with, this would not be a very wise move.
The sound card is also on board, again the same as you would expect for a budget price PC. The card is your average bog standard AC'97 with the quality of something you would get from off E-bay for a fiver. In terms of performance, it does a job and provides sound, but that's about the extent of it.
Fitted as standard is a CD writer / DVD ROM drive. This allows you to record CD's but will only play back DVD. Once again for £400 I would have expected a DVD writer to have been installed. Admittedly some manufacturers like Acer don't fit DVD writers either at this price level. At least Acer can fall back on their brand name as being well known and established in the market place. Somehow I don't think despite the fact it is an IBM product, the Lenovo name carries the same type of distinction to carry this off.
The operating system installed is Windows XP which again is the norm for this priced end of the market, although machines are slowly starting to creep though into the budget market now with Vista installed. Interestingly enough, the PC is certified as Vista compatible. With the basic spec of the machine I think it would seriously struggle to cope.
The only slightly impressive feature of this PC is the six USB ports that are provided. It's surprising how many USB ports you tend to use, as virtually every type of device now uses this type of interface. The norm on budget PC's seems to be around four.
I would say that the price I paid of £250, got me a reasonable PC for the money. Had I paid the shop price of £400, like my friend I would feel extremely short changed. It would appear that IBM have applied the same disastrous logic to the ThinkCentre PC range that was applied to the Thinkpad range of laptops. IBM assumed with their Thinkpad range that people would indeed pay well over the odds for something resembling a house brick just because it was an IBM. It didn't work with Thinkpad, and I can hardly see it working with Thinkcentre either, even more so because the IBM name has all but been disappeared in favour of the Lenovo name.
If you are looking at buying one of these as new, I would say most definitely don't bother!!! You can get a lot more PC for a lot less money if you shop around. In my opinion the asking price for this PC is is about £100 over-priced. My rating of this PC is based on the price as new.
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May 8th, 2007
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