Lenovo Windows 7
In Focus:
Lenovo’s Enhanced Experience Program Puts PCs on the Fast Track
April 26, 2012
With some of the fastest boot times on the market, Lenovo’s
design philosophy is all about quality.
April 26, 2012 — Three years ago, in the early days of
Windows 7, Microsoft was working with PC makers to help enhance start-up times,
sleep mode, battery life and the all-around performance of PCs, and this effort
continues today.
Lenovo took this initiative one
step further: Now in its third generation, the Lenovo Enhanced Experience (EE)
has become less of a Microsoft initiative and more of the “secret sauce” behind
the world’s second-largest maker of PCs.
“At Lenovo, we saw what Microsoft
was trying to do, and embraced it,” says Michael Littler, director of Marketing
for Lenovo’s Idea Product Group, which develops laptops, tablets and PCs for
the consumer market. “We worked hard on the engineering side and achieved some
excellent results in the first generation. With that success came some
executive leadership for the program, and even more resources were put into the
performance of our PCs.”
Today the third
generation of the program, known as EE3, has brought Lenovo to the
top tier of PC performance across a number of key benchmarks. Going well beyond
the scope of Microsoft’s initial efforts, Lenovo now runs proprietary software
that’s enabled the company to optimize performance on the Windows 7 platform.
The program stretches across Lenovo’s product portfolio, from consumer
notebooks, to small business products, all the way to the enterprise-class
ThinkPad line, one of the oldest brands in the PC universe.
“For each of those segments there
are advantages,” Littler says. “But it’s not just the actual benefit of the PC
booting faster or having a longer battery life. Those performance metrics are a
symptom of the quality of the product overall.”
Littler says that focus on quality
is the driving force in Lenovo’s engineering. When designing products such as
the new IdeaCentre A720 all-in-one PC, which is being launched this year,
Lenovo strives to put out the best-quality product possible. Then, once the product
is in production, the company works to optimize the cost through sourcing the
components more efficiently, to bring that product to a wider portion of the
market.
“It always begins with building the
best products we can,” Littler says. “For a generation, the ThinkPad line has
been renowned as a quality, reliable and robust product, and we place that same
priority on our consumer line.”
As an engineering manager on the
Microsoft team that engages with Lenovo, Michelle Niethammer has seen that
philosophy play out over the years. Niethammer’s team works with Lenovo to
optimize the company’s PCs and ensure all the components work well in the
Windows environment.
“They’re very focused on quality,
high-performing machines, and they continually improve on performance,”
Niethammer says. “They’ve really driven that into their core engineering
process. They test every machine. They have certain goals that must be met or
they won’t release a new design to production.”
For this year’s refresh of Lenovo’s
EE3 PCs, Niethammer says Lenovo has optimized everything from BIOS to all of
the drivers in an effort to get users to the desktop quickly. When it comes to
battery life, Niethammer’s team has worked to evaluate which apps should load
upon startup and which should be user-initiated.
“Just by moving some apps into the
user action category we got about 30 more minutes of battery life,” she says.
“Like removing extra weight from your car, it improves the PC’s mileage and
performance.”
For EE3, Niethammer says Lenovo has
also built some intelligence into the way PCs manage battery life, taking cues
from user behavior. The new functionality is an example of how the PC maker has
expanded on Microsoft’s foundational work and made the EE program pure Lenovo.
With this year’s product refresh
coming out, Littler says the Lenovo line features many of the traditional
products that have made the company successful, with some new twists like the
all-in-one A720. This year’s achievements in improved performance, he says,
have positioned Lenovo well to deliver very fast PCs for the Windows 7 world
that can make the transition to Windows 8 when it comes time.
“Windows 8 is a whole new ballgame,
and we’re working closely with Microsoft’s engineers to see how we can improve
and push the envelope for performance even further,” Littler says. “With the
products we’re launching this year, there’s no need to wait for Windows 8 to
come out. These products are some of the fastest out there for Windows 7 and
will perform well on the Windows 8 platform as well.”
Comments
Post a Comment