 |
|
 |
| |
ThinkVantage Rescue and Recovery
With Windows operating systems, you generally have to press an F-key, such as F8, to access the BIOS or boot up in safe mode. The W520 and other ThinkPads make this even easier: just hit the blue ThinkVantage button during startup. This brings up an entire menu of troubleshooting, help and support options. From here, you can access BIOS, use Norton Antivirus, diagnose hardware, rescue files, boot from another device, open up a Web browser, and more. This is definitely a step up from the two choices PC users usually get: boot to BIOS or start in some type of Windows mode. No complaints here!
Graphics card
When you are shopping for a notebook, you often have to make a choice between having a motherboard with an integrated graphics card and having dedicated graphics cards/chipset. Here is the main difference between the two: the integrated graphics option uses less power (which extends battery life), but can cause jumpy video and slower loading of images, while dedicated graphics uses more power and depletes the battery faster. For gamers it's a no-brainer; dedicated graphics is the only practical option. This is also a good choice for people who like to watch movies on their laptops - no jumpy mouse or choppy video. The W520 features a dedicated graphics interface, and in my experience with it, all graphic display scenarios were fully responsive and had no perceptible delays.
|
Battery life
How long can you expect the battery to last? We ran the following test starting with a fully charged battery: First, ThinkVantage's Power Manager helps you reduce system-wide power consumption in ways that work for you, and we had none of these options enabled. For example, the screen was set to never dim. In this full power-consumption mode, we ran 40 minutes of video with the HD spinning the whole time due to emails coming in once every few minutes, saving my work, etc. We had the following applications open as well: Word, Trillian, Excel, Acrobat Reader, Outlook, and Firefox 4. We had 77 processes running. Only about two or three of these processes sometimes had greater than 5% CPU utilization. The rest of the time and for the rest of the processes: 0%. This is a typical usage scenario. In general, users rarely run more processor-intensive applications. It is also somewhat uncommon for users to run just one small application with only a few processes running in the background.
Test results
With the W520's 9-cell battery: 3 hours, 47 minutes until 3% battery life remained. To get a longer battery life, you can simply turn off various power-using programs and change the power settings.
|
 |
|
|
3 Lights On: Nice Performer
