Lenovo IdeaCentre Q150 Review
Lenovo's IdeaCentre Q150 falls into the "nettop" category of desktop PCs, meaning it's designed to be a tiny, tiny system that can still perform basic PC tasks. Whether this system is a good deal for you depends on how you want to use it. The IdeaCentre Q150 is at its best as a living room media PC, or perhaps as a backup. It simply doesn't have the power or features of other affordable systems.
Lenovo's IdeaCentre Q150 is a super-compact desktop PC, sometimes called a "nettop." (Nettops are small PCs geared toward multimedia use.) For some purposes it's fine, say users' Lenovo IdeaCentre Q150 reviews, although PC World is not impressed. According to this expert review, the system isn't much of an advance over the earlier generation Q100 in terms of features and performance. The Lenovo IdeaCentre Q150 review praises the generous 500GB hard drive but grumbles about the system's speed and memory. In Lenovo IdeaCentre Q150 reviews on Amazon, users share their enthusiasm for the little nettop, but with some caveats. It finds favor as a spare PC and/or one dedicated to living room use as a media PC. Consumers say it streams most audio and video well, although several report problems playing 1080p streaming video.
The Lenovo IdeaCentre Q150 runs Intel's Atom D510 CPU, a processor designed for small PCs and netbooks. Atom CPUs are not as zippy as Intel i3 CPUs, but they can run small machines well enough. The IdeaCentre Q150 runs Windows 7, and features 2GB of RAM and 500GB of hard drive storage -- a nice-sized hard drive for a tiny desktop system. One feature this PC does lack is an optical drive -- it's just too small to accommodate one -- but you can plug in an external drive. Most desktops have at least six USB ports, but the Q150 sports only four. We'd really like to see a minimum of six ports because the existing four get filled up quickly: your mouse and keyboard take up the first two, and the external optical drive requires a port. The remaining port will have to take turns connecting this nettop PC to your digital camera, MP3 player, printer, scanner, external hard drive, Web camera, and anything else that you'd plug into a PC via a USB port.
The IdeaCentre Q150 does an OK job as a budget media PC, but it's a little too light to serve as a primary system. Don't get us wrong -- it can handle most of the tasks that any other budget PC routinely masters, such as Web surfing, but the Q150 is at its best serving up video and audio to your home theater system. Lenovo engineers desperately need to find room to add a couple more USB ports, and if they could squeeze in a couple extra gigabytes of RAM, so much the better.
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