Tech Bitch

Lenovo is on a roll. The second desktop PC to arrive at my offices in as many weeks, the ThinkCentre M57p (from £350) is built for stability and manageability and should therefore appeal greatly to both small and large businesses - and even enterprises. Kitted out the company’s typical livery of black (which I love by the way), the ThinkCentre M57p looks very similar to the company’s energy-saving A Series, but offers enhanced multimedia features and supports Intel’s Active Management Technology.

Available in tower, small form and ultra-small form factors, the ThinkCentre M57p is perfectly tailored to the specific needs of business users. For instance, it comes with a raft of tools to help you manage and secure just one or a fleet of hundreds. The complexity of IT management is also helped in several ways. For instance, Active Management Technology 3.0 from Intel provides advanced levels of PC remote management to power the PC when the OS or hard disk drive is inoperable, or the PC is turned off. Lenovo’s unique ThinkVantage Technologies allow a manager or user to restore data in less than 10 minutes and recover from viruses and other software failures. It also provides capabilities not found in traditional backup and restore programs.

Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT) is a feature on the company’s Centrino with vPro technology and Core 2 processor with vPro technology. Using built-in platform capabilities and popular third-party management and security applications, AMT allows IT managers to better discover, heal, and protect their networked computing assets. AMT stores hardware and software information in non-volatile memory. With built-in manageability, Intel AMT allows you to discover a computer’s assets, even while the PC is powered off. With Intel AMT, remote consoles do not rely on local software agents, helping to avoid accidental data loss.

Furthermore, the built-in manageability of Intel AMT provides out-of-band management capabilities to allow you to remotely heal systems after OS failures. Alerting and event logging helps detect problems quickly to reduce downtime. A System Defense Feature helps protect your network from threats at the source by proactively blocking incoming threats, reactively containing infected clients before they impact the network, and proactively alerting you when critical software agents are removed. Intel AMT also helps to protect your network by making it easier to keep software and virus protection consistent and up-to-date across the enterprise. Third-party software can store version numbers or policy data in non-volatile memory for off-hours retrieval or updates.

The ThinkCentre M57p will never outperform a regular consumer desktop PC, but it does offer excessive performance for the typical business user (how much power do you really need for MS Office and Web browsing?). All chassis designs share the same internal component choices (processors, motherboard chipsets, and to an extent, graphics), so you can use the same drive image on all desktop models. Having said that, the ultra-small form factor model uses a laptop-style optical drive. Tool-less entry (no screwdriver needed) offers unmatched serviceability and upgradeability with completely tool-less components, allowing quick access to hard drives/floppy drives, optical devices and adapter cards.

The machine comes with a range of discrete graphics card choices, memory (up to 8GB, 667MHz DDR2) and hard drive (up to 250GB) options, and security features including I/O port disablement, TPM1.2 security chip and support for Computrace software. Gigabit Ethernet is also integrated as standard, along with eight USB 2.0 ports, headphone and microphone jacks, serial and parallel ports, eSATA, and analogue video-out. Our review system came with Windows Vista Business, though Windows XP is available as well.

The ThinkVantage Client Security Solution, along with the optional Fingerprint reader keyboard, provides an extra layer of protection for passwords, encryption keys and electronic credentials. This unique hardware/software solution - available on select models (and requiring download of security software) - provides a level of security not offered as a standard feature on a PC from any other manufacturer. In workplace environments, PC acoustics are important, and incremental improvements can make an exponential difference in the computing experience. With an up to 5dB improvement over previous models, the desktop offers a quiet, non-distracting experience. Lenovo also says it has reduced the desktop’s average running temperature by 9% for greater reliability.

The ThinkCentre M57p continues the tradition of excellence for this desktop line that started when it was owned by IBM’s Personal Computing Division. Lenovo has produced yet another winner that should fit in with all but the most creative of businesses. Of course, it’s expensive compared to a consumer PC and lesser single-core business PCs, but for small-to-midsize business owners looking for enterprise-level hardware along with forward-looking technologies and amazing management features, the ThinkCentre M57p is in a league of its own. [9]

The concept of computer imaging is a Godsend for anyone who’s endured the Setup program for Windows more than 10 times in their lives. You can create a single system image and send it out across your network to keep all your workstations uniform and up-to-date.

Cloning was originally developed as a method of quickly setting-up new Windows computers and rolling out applications and updates. An ‘ideal’ desktop computer’s software and configuration is captured as an ‘image’ that is then replicated onto multiple machines using cloning software. The IT landscape, however, has become vastly more complex, with constant updates to applications, configuration software, plug-ins, intelligent chips and motherboards. This means that two otherwise identical desktop computers (let alone adding laptops to the mix) can have enough driver differences to cause the cloning process to render machines inoperable without considerable manual modification.

Universal Imaging Utility (UIU) was developed to resolve this issue by simplifying the process, ensuring that when an image is taken of the ideal machine, all the driver combinations required by each machine are made available to each machine. The software therefore enables IT departments to reduce the time and money spent on image creation and deployment by streamlining the cloning process. It works with leading cloning applications such as Symantec’s Ghost, PowerQuest’s Drive Image Pro, Altiris’ Migration Suite, Novell’s ZENworks and Acronis’ TrueImage, making it possible for these programs to create a single, clean disk image. The image created will then work with virtually any Windows platform or configuration.

So how does the software work? Used in conjunction with your regular hard disk drive imaging software it creates a disk image that can be successfully deployed to nearly any PC in your environment, regardless of HAL type, processor, PC make or model. Maintaining individual images for PCs from Dell, HP, IBM, etc. is no longer required. Designed for Microsoft Windows Vista, XP and 2000 systems specifically, UIU resets your existing Windows installation to a similar state, allowing for correct detection of different hardware platforms upon image deployment without crashing the systems. A regularly updated driver database is also installed, assuring greater compatibility with new hardware components. So, as you get new hardware, with new video, network and audio components, you need not maintain those drivers.

How difficult is it to use? The procedure is actually relatively easy: you setup your Master Windows 2000, XP or Vista computer and capture a base image using the guidelines provided. This is the most time consuming step of the process. UIU will then modify your system, install drivers, launch Sysprep, and then shut your PC down - all in less than 10 minutes. At that point you need to take a normal image in DOS or Win PE (do not reboot to Windows!) using your disk imaging software. That’s it. No drivers, no Plug-n-Play IDs, no need to sweat through Sysprep. UIU even creates your Sysprep.inf or Sysprep.xml file for you. You can then deploy the image to your other PCs the way you always have.

Support for Microsoft’s System Preparation tool (Sysprep) helps keep you in compliance with Microsoft’s standards for disk imaging, and UIU uses it to help detect the hardware components on a machine receiving a Universal Image. Additionally, Sysprep will change the Security ID (SID) on your recipient PCs, allowing for consistent interaction with any Active Directory domain structure. UIU handles Sysprep for you though, so there is no need to build a custom Sysprep answer file.

Because UIU strips the image to its bare bones, you could potentially take an image built on an IDE-based machine and port it directly to a SCSI or SATA platform. It also incorporates other Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) configurations into the base image and resets the original HAL, so you don’t even have to confine your image to similarly configured machines (the HAL acts as the interface between hardware and software). During the UIU master image installation process, you can specify these as additional options. You can also use your own .INF file. Sysprep doesn’t achieve nearly as much as this as it mainly does things like initiate the mini-setup to search for new hardware, reset user/machine details and rewrite SIDs.

Licensing for UIU 2.0 is per-seat and is based on the number of computers that receive an Image which was prepared with the assistance of UIU. Corporate pricing starts at under £11 per-seat for up to 99 computers and goes down to less than £5 per-seat for 5000 or more licenses. Academic and Government pricing is also available. Almost as important as the software itself, when you license UIU, you get the driver database, which Binary Research updates on a regular basis. These regular updates are most helpful if you frequently refresh your images. If you have a great diversity of workstations, desktops and laptops on your network, UIU can save you tons of time in terms of keeping your images up-to-date.

There are some limitations, however. Windows Server installations aren’t supported, even if the imaging software can create server images, and RAID disks aren’t supported. SCSI drives can’t be used as sources either, so although an image can be installed to a SCSI drive it can’t be created from one. Furthermore, an image created on an ACPI-compliant system won’t be happy on a system that isn’t. And finally, your disk-imaging software must be able to run from a DOS prompt - Windows-based imaging software isn’t supported. It’s definitely worth a look though. [7.5]

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]