Lenovo's 3000 C200 series of business laptop computers stand out in the world of widescreen displays as these more traditional portables offer a square screen to look at.

Even though it's non-widescreen, the 15-inch screen still presents a good amount of real estate for your applications with a decent 1024x768 resolution and an anti-glare coating for use in bright light environments. And these laptops start out priced at under $800--a feature that the accounting department of your small business will love.

At the baseline price you get an adequate processor, the 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo 15500 430, and only 512MB of RAM. It's speedy 667MHz memory, but that's barely enough to run the installed Windows Vista Basic operating system. Storage on this laptop line is a modest 80GB in a 5,400rpm hard drive, but these are business systems so you probably won't be housing tons of audio or video files. The optical drive on these laptops is higher end--a Dual Layer DVD writer that can handle both traditional DVD and CD burns as well as writes to high capacity DL media that can store up to 8.5GB of data per disk.

Communication is swift, with gigabit Ethernet adapters built into these laptops for connecting to your high-speed office network. They also feature a traditional modem and 802.11b/g wireless, so you can connect to the internet remotely.

There aren't any ExpressCard slots on this laptop line, but they do have a PCMCIA slot as well as four USB and a Firewire port for hooking up high-speed peripherals. There's also a 5-in-1 media card reader that makes it easy to transfer files and photos from a PDA or digital camera.

These laptops ship with Lenovo Care tools, including one-button system recovery to restore your system after a crash or virus infection as well as wireless and network connection management that automatically saves profiles for later use.

At just over an inch thick and a little over six pounds, these laptops aren't thin-and-light machines, but they're still trim enough to carry around without too much effort.

And even after the core power and operating system upgrade, these laptops come in at well under a grand. If you're looking for a well designed and powerful laptop computer for your small business, the Lenovo 3000 line is a great find.


Pro: Great price, decent components
Con: Non-widescreen display

Warranty
1-year limited