Lenovo A63 ThinkCentre Desktop Review for Small Business Owners

Mobility is important to many small business owners, but so is power and efficiency.  If you’re doing more intense work than surfing websites or writing emails, you might want to look at the Lenovo A63 ThinkCentre desktop computer.

We received the A63 as a short term test review and instead of returning it, Lenovo offered to let us give it away to our readers!  Read more about the Desktop Computer Giveaway Contest that ends April 29, 2010.

This review machine came with two Lenovo ThinkVision 22″ flat panel monitors.   I’ve not owned a desktop for over 10 years and have been working from a small laptop screen, so my amazement at the color and brightness and quality is probably behind the times!  It was hard to go from these dual large monitors back to my laptop, that’s for sure.

Best and most notable features

The small businessperson who is crunching a lot of data or, more likely, a lot of simple video for marketing on YouTube or elsewhere will like this machine.  Or, if you’ve been a mobile warrior and now want something fast and friendly with a powerful graphics card, this is a machine to evaluate.  My goal isn’t to give you tech specs that cause your eyes to glaze over. It is fast and you can make it faster, if you need to crunch more high definition video.  I ran Pinnacle Studios and Camtasia as tests to create some small business videos and was very pleased with its performance over my laptop (which is a pretty fast Sony VAIO).

Another benefit to the small businessperson is that if you ever have to change out all the hard drives, the Lenovo is one of the best-engineered machines I’ve seen. Any team that puts as much time into simple functions like removing a hard drive without tools has thought deeply about the busy owner or tech person.

The support options with a Lenovo are also substantial:  It comes with one-year on site warranty.  On-site as in they come to your office and fix it if something goes wrong in that first year.  It also comes with a green certification to shrink your carbon footprint (that translates also to power savings on your power bill each year, too). They provide preloaded tools like Rescue & Recovery and System Migration to save you money, time, and effort in setting up a new machine.

It will power 4 monitors at once.  This is an impressive feature, not one that I could use, but some might find it very useful. It powers two easily, right out of the box. They sent us two L2250P flat panels to prove it and just like the desktop, they came ready to go. You clip on the base stand and plug them in.

Just a few of the Lenovo A63 features include:

• Energy efficient DDR3 with up to 1333 Mhz speeds (which contributes to its Greenguard certification)
• Latest AMD processor with high performance
• 250 GB Hard drive
• 2 GB Memory (DDR3)
• DVD RW
• 6 USB Ports
• Lenovo ThinkVision Flat Panel Monitor
• Capable of powering 4 Monitors
• Keyboard & Mouse
• Tool-free Design:  Remove the hard drive and/or motherboard with no tools
• Genuine Windows 7 Professional Operating System

What they could have done better

The one thing that I didn’t prefer is the CD/DVD tray – the button is below the tray as it ejects. I think it should be on top because as I reach my hand over you inevitably tap or bump the fragile tray with your hand.  I also would have liked a better keyboard and mouse as a standard option, but you can use your old one or upgrade, of course.  Small points to be sure.

Who it is best for

The Lenovo A63 is great for a small businessperson who doesn’t have a lot of time to mess around with configuring and getting a new machine running. Lenovo has put a lot of thought into this and you pull it out of the box and plug it in and you are up in running in literally minutes.

Learn more about the Lenovo A63 ThinkCentre desktop.

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