As this is a family-oriented system, it comes loaded with a wealth of gaming and educational programs. In total, I counted a staggering 40 pre-installed applications. Normally this would cause a ton of concern but given the nature of the system and the fact that some games are actually quite fun, there is little to complain about.
Lenovo utilizes a custom user interface known as Aura. It’s through this UI that you can launch all of the installed games, apps, and so much more using the virtual jog wheel. Aura allows you to load video clips, photos and music as well as shop for new apps and games through the Lenovo App Shop. The software works surprisingly well although there is a hint of lag every now and then. With Windows 8, we were forced to modify our benchmarking procedures slightly. PCMark Vantage refused to give an overall score no matter how hard I tried. We are also doing away with our “real-world” web-browsing battery test in favor of the much more standardized Powermark application. All of our other testing procedures have been carried over from Windows 7.
Benchmarks Results
The iTunes encoding tests consist of converting 14 MP3s (119MB) to 128Kbps ACC files and measuring the operation’s duration in seconds. For the file transfer test, we measure how long it takes to copy two sets of files from one location to another on the same hard drive. On the small files test we transfer 557 MP3s, totaling 2.56GB. For the large file, these same MP3s were zipped into a single file measuring 2.52GB.
27" multi-touch 1920 x 1080 display Intel Core i5 3337U (1.8 - 2.7GHz, dual-core Ivy Bridge) 6GB DDR3 Intel HD Graphics 4000 Nvidia GeForce GT 620M 1TB Hitachi 5400 RPM hard drive HDMI-in Windows 8 64-bit
27" multi-touch 1920 x 1080 display Intel Core i5-3550S (3.0 - 3.7GHz, quad-core Ivy Bridge) 8GB DDR3-1600 RAM Radeon HD 6550A graphics 2TB Hitachi 7200 RPM hard drive DVD RW optical drive HDMI-in Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
