Lenovo ThinkCentre All-in-One A70z: Saves space and Nothing Else

Lenovo took over IBM and is relatively new in comparison. IBM’s ThinkCentre and ThinkPad series were always known to be workhorses. Now Lenovo’s All-in-One PC solutions also have usually done quite well and they obviously want to carry the trend forward. All-in-One PCs are usually meant for easy setup, no-nonsense desktop PCs meant usually for home use. Some offices also use them and these PCs are known for consuming very less space on your desk. Now that the A70z has come in for review, we put it through its paces and see whether it gives you a good bang for your buck.

Design and Build Quality
The package consists of three components, the screen with the CPU integrated into it, a mouse and a keyboard. Setting up the whole system is quite simple, as all you have to do is find some space, plug the keyboard and mouse to the screen, plug the screen to a power source and you’re good to go.

Ports behind are placed well, metal stand is strong

At first glance, the monitor has a typical ThinkCentre look and feel to it. It has a black colour with a non-glossy finish throughout, means it doesn’t attract unnecessary smudges on the body. For that matter, even the 19-inch display screen has a matte finish which is nice and makes viewing quite comfortable. The metal stand behind is foldable and because of the solid metal rod it gives the screen a firm support, without any kind of wobbling or instability whatsoever. While on a whole the design and build quality of the monitor is nice, the thick bezel around the display wastes space and could have looked a lot sleeker. 

Lenovo hasn’t really made too much of a change to the design and build quality of the keyboard either. Instead, continuing with that same design, Lenovo has added a little bit of colour, by making keys of the same function (for e.g. F1-F11, or the Enter keys) of the same colour which is a nice thing and helps the user to easily differentiate between them. Anyway, the keyboard as mentioned earlier has been built well and the keys are big and are quite soft to press. Personally, I liked the whole experience of typing on the A70z’s keyboard.
The mouse also compliments the combination and has been built quite well. The buttons are firm to press, the middle wheel scrolls quite smoothly and on a whole it works quite well. However, the mouse feet are really thin and are bound to wear off after use on a hard surface.

Features
The A70z has six USB ports - three at the back of the screen and the rest on the side. It’s a good thing that the keyboard and mouse have long wires and can be connected at the back, which makes the USB ports at the side free to use to connect external hard drives, pen drives or any other USB-based devices. Apart from these ports, there’s a VGA and an Ethernet port behind and at the side along with the other three USB ports, there’s an audio jack and a line-in port as well. Apart from these features, this desktop PC has Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n for wireless internet which works quite well. There’s Bluetooth 3.0 for transferring data with portable devices like mobile phones.

Thick bezel around the screen could have been avoided

The power button is located at the right bottom of the screen which is very easy to access, but the brightness controls located on the side should have rather been placed next to the button which would have made it more convenient to use. 

On the other side, there’s a DVD RW tray and the grip at the centre of the tray works pretty well to hold CDs or DVDs in place. The A70z also has a webcam at the centre on top of the screen that has a 1.3 Megapixel lens.

Coming to the specifications, the A70z has a pretty outdated Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 processor, which clocks at 2.93 GHz. There is 2GB of RAM and 320GB of Hard Disk space which is low by today's standards but will be good enough to install software, movies and games. Many netbooks nowadays come with 500GB built in. Also, the Intel GM45 chipset means that the on-board graphics is not really meant for gaming or other high-end purposes like graphics designing and so on.