Lenovo IdeaCentre Horizon 27-Inch All-in-One Review

Performance, Software Bundle

Booting completely into the OS took 31 seconds out of the box which is on the slow side for Windows 8. As I typically do with a new system, I made a beeline to the Add/Remove Programs section of the Control Panel. Aside from all of the pre-installed games that come on the Table PC, the only suspect program I found and promptly removed was McAfee Internet Security. This program was eating a ton of CPU cycles seemingly all the time. In fact, removing it shaved a full 10 seconds off the cold boot time.

As this is a family-oriented system, it comes loaded with a wealth of gaming and educational programs. In total, I counted a staggering 40 pre-installed applications. Normally this would cause a ton of concern but given the nature of the system and the fact that some games are actually quite fun, there is little to complain about.

Lenovo utilizes a custom user interface known as Aura. It's through this UI that you can launch all of the installed games, apps, and so much more using the virtual jog wheel. Aura allows you to load video clips, photos and music as well as shop for new apps and games through the Lenovo App Shop. The software works surprisingly well although there is a hint of lag every now and then.

With Windows 8, we were forced to modify our benchmarking procedures slightly. PCMark Vantage refused to give an overall score no matter how hard I tried. We are also doing away with our "real-world" web-browsing battery test in favor of the much more standardized Powermark application. All of our other testing procedures have been carried over from Windows 7.

Benchmarks Results

The iTunes encoding tests consist of converting 14 MP3s (119MB) to 128Kbps ACC files and measuring the operation's duration in seconds. For the file transfer test, we measure how long it takes to copy two sets of files from one location to another on the same hard drive. On the small files test we transfer 557 MP3s, totaling 2.56GB. For the large file, these same MP3s were zipped into a single file measuring 2.52GB.