Trusted Reviews reviewed the Lenovo 3000 C100 Notebook. Inside this machine lives a 1.73GHz Pentium M processor, running on the 915 chipset. Graphics are onboard and eat in to the system memory. There is only a single 512MB module of DDR-II memory, so the system is only running in single channel memory mode. There is only a 40GB hard drive, which is probably fine as long as you have a network server to save data to, or another machine. As well as the 10/100Mbit LAN, there is a 56k modem, 11Mbit and 54Mbit wireless as well as Bluetooth.

We tested this notebook in the usual way, running SYSmark 2002, MobileMark 2005 and PCMark 2005. We compared this to the Gateway Mx6640b that I reviewed recently, which is in the same price bracket but with a slightly faster 1.83GHz processor and 1GB of memory in dual channel mode.  Results were very surprising. In SYSmark, despite having a slower processor, less RAM and only in single channel mode, the Lenovo pulls away from the Gateway Mx6640b, although the two point difference is nothing to write home about. In Internet Content Creation the Gateway is ahead, while in Office Productivity the Lenovo is ahead by 11 points.

Looking at the PCMark results give a good indication as to why the SYSmark score turned out this way. It seems the Seagate hard drive in the Lenovo drive is quite a bit faster than the Hitachi in the Gateway and SYSmark is obviously quite hard drive dependent. In all other respects, the Gateway was faster, winning in both PCMark and MobileMark for performance. What MobileMark shows best of all though, is how astonishingly good the battery life on the Lenovo is. At 347 minutes, this is close to six hours of usage. Even during DVD playback it lasted 200 minutes which is well over three hours.

At first, the Lenovo doesn't seem anything special and its 1,024x768 panel seems quite limiting. However, when taking the price of £575.97 and the close to six hour battery life in to account, you realise that this is a really good value notebook for taking on the road.