It’s Windows 7 launch day… and that means many of those pretty little netbooks and notebooks I told you about the other day that come preloaded with Windows 7 are now shipping. I placed an order for an Acer Aspire Timeline AS181T to review and it should ship in a few days. But I’ve already seen evidence that 10 inch netbooks from Asus, HP, Sony, and other PC makers have already shipped.
In related news, Lenovo has updated the IdeaPad S12 order page to reflect the fact that the $429 laptop is now available with a choice of Windows XP or Windows 7 Home Premium. What’s interesting is that there doesn’t appear to be a Windows 7 option for the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 at Lenovo.com. But you can order the company’s 10.1 inch laptop with Windows 7 Starter Edition from Amazon for $349.99. The same laptop is available from Lenovo.com for $299 and up.
Lenovo’s new IdeaPad Y550 is something of a mystery, considering that just about everything on the laptop is a compromise of some sort; from the 15.6 inch screen to the NVIDIA GeForce G210M graphics processor, RAM memory and hard drive space.
Note, however, that I did not say that this was entirely a bad thing.
The IdeaPad Y550 seems to be a great general laptop, despite having only 1 GB of RAM (which is fixable for a low cost through Lenovo or independently). The laptop has a large array of peripheral ports and a decent amount of memory and a pretty decent graphics processor for a relatively low price. The array of ports also means that you can plug a variety of accessories into your laptop, anticipating both existing and future options. This could help keep you from being unable to use that hot new addition a year or two from now just because you don’t have the right port. You can find the full specs here if you’re interested.
Here are the specs, lifted from About.com:
* Intel Pentium Dual-Core T4200 Dual Core Mobile Processor
* 1GB PC3-8500 DDR3 Memory
* 160GB 5400rpm SATA Hard Drive
* 8x DVD+/-RW Dual Layer Burner
* 15.6″ WXGA (1366×768) LED Backlit Display With 1.3 Megapixel Webcam
* NVIDIA GeForce G210 Graphics With 512MB Memory
* Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11b/g Wireless
* Three USB 2.0, eSATA, HDMI, VGA, ExpressCard/34, 6-in-1 Card Reader
* 15.2″ x 10″ x 1.5″ @ 6.1 lbs.
* Vista Home Premium
Overall, for the flexibility inherent in this laptop and given the possibility of a model under $650, this isn’t a bad laptop to consider if you’re on a budget.