Back to school with El Reg - how about a chunky Lenovo for the student in your life? With a new school term fast approaching, The Register has got its claws on Lenovo's second generation 300e laptop, a device aimed fairly and squarely at students. The first impressions are good. The 300e has the appearance of a robust beast: the chassis has rubberised edging, suggesting it should be able to withstand a drop or …
Don't worry, after Brexit we won't have to worry about that pesky GDPR. Our CCTV systems will send Microsoft all of our movements, and our courts can simply mandate the storage of all of our personal thoughts and data in Azure. Add in mandatory cameras in the bedroom -- IoT of course -- to enforce the porn laws and you've got a perfect British implementation of the instructions laid out in Orwell's textbooks.
No, it's only complete pants when anchored with a copy of Windows. Give it a light weight *nix distro & it will be more than enough to chew up most tasks & spit them out like a champ. Afterall, old netbooks with a 1GHz CPU & 2Gb of RAM were perfectly fine with Linux on them & this machine has that beat.
My Granddaughter's machine will run Cupertino, Redmond or Slackware as she sees fit. She lives in Slackware unless the school forces her into Apple or Microsoft, and then she grumbles.
It took the school over a year before they noticed she was running Slackware. Then they threw a shit-fit. My daughter took great delight in explaining how stupid they were being ... My GD is a straight-A student, so obviously she was completing the coursework despite the crippled tools that the school district was trying to saddle her with.
"Also lurking within that chassis is an Intel Celeron N4100 CPU, clocked at 1.1 GHz, 4GB of soldered-on RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage."
Wow, a slowon at 1.1 ? And 4GB of *soldered* RAM ? My daughter is a student and I'm dead sure she won't do fuck all with that ...
"That £627 cost is Lenovo's list price."
Re-Wow, complete rip-off.
Yeah, agreed. I read the article and as it went through the specs - 1.1GHz processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage - I was nodding to myself and thinking “yes, fair enough, it’s obviously a dirt-cheap disposable machine that won’t break the bank if little Timmy drops/loses it at school”... then I saw the price. £627? Nope. Nope, nope, nope.
I gave up with the review at "1366 x 768". How on earth can that be an acceptable screen resolution (actually, how did it ever become one)?
Not trying to compare apples and oranges, but for me the amazing thing about the Surface family is the 2700 x 1800 or better resolutions - you can actually do a decent amount of work without wearing out your scroll buttons
I completely agree, but now you would struggle to see that much text (at an acceptable size) on a "modern" display (i.e. the one I mentioned).
The first business computer I worked with was a Wang MVP 2200 - text only, on a green screen (I can't remember if it got up to 80x25 characters, but it certainly didn't exceed it). No, I don't miss it.
My youngest has an otherwise pretty decent ASUS Core i3 laptop (with tablet mode, and full HD resolution) which was cheaper than this Lenovo offering, much better specced, and on the whole a machine you can work on. The one thing I absolutely hate about it is the position of the power switch, right next to volume control. Even just picking up the thing can cause a shutdown. This Lenovo machine has NO WAY written all over it from where I stand.
If anyone's seriously interested in paying way over the odds for a unupgradeable, low res, low memory, low storage, absurdly underpowered lappy for their beloved offspring to tout around campus, a five year old 11" Macbook Air from eBay will cost less, have better specs and (possibly, if they like shiny things) please your teenager more, while also helping to ensure they don't slip a disc lugging the thing around. I can only assume someone at Lenovo set that price as a joke.
From my time in a private school careless is a understatement, not giving a flying a flying fuck is more generally more accurate.
Case in point kid came in with smashed screen on his school supplied laptop, every morning he would bring his loaner unit back with another smashed screen & turned up 30 seconds after the replacement screen arrived in the post for fitting, with yet another smashed screen loaner.
Icon - Cause the little bastard(s) really needed a good visit from Jimmy Edwards.
.... this is what I got for my middle school daughter... for $232 (less than this lenova kit in the UK), will be getting an entry level Dell Inspiron 3000 series with: Intel Core i3-7020U, 4GB DDR4 (Expandable), 128GB M.2 PCIe SSD (replaceable) 15.6" FHD LED (1920x1080), Intel HD Graphics 620
Note that the RAM and the drive are expandable/replaceable. For those paying attention, that is a computer with an EASILY upgradeable NVME drive for $232. And upgrading RAM will be just as simple.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
