Tech Bitch

Lenovo has raised the bar with its smallest, quietest and most energy-efficient desktop to date. The ultra-small form factor ThinkCentre A61e (from £270) also uses up to 90% reusable/recyclable materials as well as 90% recyclable packaging, making it one of the greenest desktop PCs on the planet. But the biggest attraction of the ThinkCentre A61e is its unobtrusiveness: it has a footprint the size of an average telephone book (275×242x81mm) and offers whisper quiet performance. Yet with a choice of AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core and AMD Sempron single-core processors, there’s plenty of power under the hood to run typical business applications.

The ThinkCentre A61e desktop marks Lenovo’s first product with EPEAT Gold status, the highest designation a product can achieve in the ranking. Operated by the Green Electronics Council, EPEAT ranks products on a variety of environmental attributes from energy efficiency to materials use to recyclability. Many organisations in the U.S. use this tool to help make purchasing decisions. Recognised for its environmental attributes, the ThinkCentre A61e can even be powered by an optional solar panel.

The desktop surpasses the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Energy Star 4.0 criteria with its 85% efficient power supply. To put this into perspective: a single user could save in a year, on average, the equivalent of the carbon dioxide emissions created by two round-trip plane flights from Boston to New York; a customer deploying as few as 50 desktops could expect to save more than £500 a year in energy costs alone. And it could help avoid more than 20,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions; a large enterprise deployment of 50,000 desktops could save more than £500,000 in annual energy costs and cut more than 20 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. Yikes!

The ThinkCentre A61e follows Lenovo’s recent introduction of the ThinkCentre A61 in tower form factor to equip enterprise users with leading technologies such as I/O port disablement for security, and support for up to four monitors for data-intensive task. Under the hood it has a modest range of components, but expandability options are obviously limited due to the size of the machine (you get no half-height expansion card slots for making upgrades).

My review sample (£540) was supplied with an AMD Athlon X2 BE 2350 (2.10GHz) processor, 512MB of 667MHz PC2-5300 DDR2 memory (upgradable to 4GB), 80GB Serial ATA HDD, and ATI Radeon X1200 graphics chipset. Other niceties included a matching 16x CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive and Windows XP Professional (Vista is optional).

Connectivity options are restrictive compared to a typical desktop PC, but this isn’t too much of an issue for corporates looking for a machine that’s easy to lock down in order to minimise threats from external sources. At the front of the system are two USB 2.0 ports as well as headphone and microphone jacks, while the rear of the machine houses a single Gigabit Ethernet port, four more USB 2.0 ports, VGA-out, another headphone jack, and line-in/out audio ports.

The most obvious omissions are a media reader, FireWire and DVI ports, as well as legacy PS/2 ports, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities, but again these aren’t essential for a business machine. Security features are excellent however, comprising a security slot (in rear for optional Kensington Microsaver cable), startup sequence control, hard drive I/O control, power on password, startup without keyboard, mouse, diskette drive, and unattended start-up.

The importance of maximising energy efficiency and being environmentally conscious is touching all aspects of our daily lives, from the light bulbs we use to light our homes to the hybrid cars we drive to the green technology we rely on to run our businesses. Lenovo is committed to providing an extensive menu of environmentally-responsible, energy-efficient technology choices, and the ThinkCentre A61e desktop is its signature item. For the first time a major PC vendor has combined small size and consistently quiet acoustics with a lightweight, highly energy-efficient desktop offering at an affordable price.

Taking up 25% less space than previous models and weighing just 3.72kg (about twice the overall volume of the Apple Mac Mini), the ThinkCentre A61e fits the shrinking real estate in today’s work environment, making it an especially good fit for customers in education, medical and financial sectors. It would also make a reasonable home office system, as long as your needs aren’t too demanding. There’s little scope for expandability, and more raw power and eye-candy can be had for the same price from other companies, but none are so well suited to corporate life than the ThinkCentre A61e. [8]