Hands on with the Lenovo IdeaPad S10

Lenovo IdeaPad

Times are hard and my Apple PowerBook G4 is on its last pixels… its Firewire port doesn’t work, I think the Bluetooth is bust and the final straw was the screen – most of the time two thirds of it has bands of grey or garbage across it and I have to fiddle with the screen for ages to get a picture, like messing with a set-top aerial on an old TV. I can’t afford to replace it with a MacBook let alone a MacBookPro, so I turned my attention back to netbooks again.

Price Barrier

I was on the verge of buying the Samsung NC10 – it’s quite cute and the battery life is excellent – when Amazon shoved the price back over the psychological £300 barrier. I think netbooks should cost under £300, preferably closer to £200. Amazon then sent me some spam about the Lenovo S10 and I couldn’t believe the price – £255 inc VAT and shipping.

In many ways this is a very ordinary netbook – small, 1024×600 display, WiFi, WindowsXP Home Edition, ethernet, webcam, 3 USB ports and an SD card reader. But it had a few features that made me make an impulse purchase: its 160GB hard drive – the same size as my £1700 PowerBook’s – is removable, which is neat as it’s the thing most likely to go wrong. It also has Bluetooth and a PCI Express card slot, which is unheard of for a netbook this cheap.

It’s possible Amazon made a mistake with the price, as I then saw it listed at £320. But it is a lovely machine. Best of all is the display, which is very bright and crisp. I know my PowerBook was getting a little old, but it’s like someone has cleaned my glasses. Not that I wear glasses. The keyboard is fine, the trackpad better than some I’ve tried – not as good as an Apple one I grant you. It has a switch on the side to turn WiFi and Bluetooth off, useful if you are on a plane, want to save power – or you’re just paranoid.

I put this solidly-built little machine to good use yesterday, perching it in the kitchen, playing stuff off Spotify all day and keeping me entertained while I did battle installing the world’s most fiendish dishwasher (if Ikea made dishwashers, it would be the Fisher and Paykel DishDrawer, but that’s another story…)

Little boots

It boots fairly quickly into Windows, but I discovered that it also has a button marked QS; this stands for QuickStart, and boots the machine very quickly into a Linuxy SplashTop kind of OS, giving you a basic web browser, Skype, photo manager, MP3 player etc. It’s possible this will do enough to hold me off putting Linux on this machine… but…

I am the Cheese Photo Booth

The Linux Question

Now, I’m no fan of Windows, but I do admit I find it quite useful that I now have my first ever WindowsXP machine of my own and I can run all sorts of software. I want to keep XP on here, even if I add Linux. This should’t be a problem, but it brings us to one big drawback with the IdeaPad. Lenovo do not supply a system restore DVD or a Windows install disk. There is something called One Key Recovery – a button that rebuilds your machine, but this relies on code stored in a separate partition on the hard drive. Clearly if you add a new OS, you risk trashing this backup. Not good, expecially as you have paid for a legal XP licence – the key is stuck on the bottom of the machine.

So what to do? Firstly I need to get me a USB DVD writer and back up the hard drive and make a bootable Windows recovery disk – there are a few ways to do this, but frankly I shouldn’t be doing this, Lenovo should supply one. Another option is to get a new SATA drive, keep the old one intact, and muck around with a factory fresh one and then I can go back to Windows and the SplashTop Quick Start OS if I want. A third way is to use WUBI – this a Windows installer for Ubuntu that installs Ubuntu inside Windows without altering the disk partitions, although I fancy using the Ubuntu Netbook Remix and there is currently no easy way of installing this netbook-friendly Linux from WUBI (I was running it off a USB stick in the screenshot above).

Cake and eating it

And then there is OS X. Yes, OS X. Some people have got OS X running on the IdeaPad, admittedly with no audio and no ethernet but they do have graphics and WiFi working. This seems quite astonishing to me – I could have the best of both worlds: an insanely cheap and an insanely great laptop.

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2 Responses to Hands on with the Lenovo IdeaPad S10

  1. James says:

    The One Key Recovery thing does seem a little fragile as a way to restore your system. If, as you say, the HD is the weak link then using that as your Get Out of Jail Free card is a bit odd.

    Other than that it looks fun. How’s the screen for reading text?

  2. blogmywiki says:

    The screen is great – it’s so crisp and bright that even tiny text looks good and is easy to read… at least in Windows. I think Ubuntu was fine too. Maybe not as good in QuickStart / SplashTop but I’d need to do some tests.

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