Lenovo ThinkCentre A58 review

Lenovo’s ThinkCentre A58 is aimed at business users. It has a three-year onsite warranty, which is reassuring and surprisingly generous at this price. Unfortunately, the A58 is significantly less powerful than the other £400 PCs. The 2.5GHz Pentium Dual Core E5200 is comparatively slow and we expected more than 2GB of RAM. The result is a PC that lags behind the competition, particularly in our video-encoding test. It’s fine for everyday use, but you can get faster computers for this price.

To upgrade to Windows 7 you’ll need to pay around £15, bringing the price to £376 (the upgrade is available until 31st January).

As it’s a business PC, the A58 doesn’t have features you’d find in a consumer PC. There are no surround-sound outputs and no dedicated graphics card; the onboard Intel GMA 4500 graphics aren’t good enough for games.

Although there’s a PCI Express x16 graphics card slot and a PCI slot for peripherals such as a sound card, these are half-height due to the A58’s small size, which limits your choice of add-on cards. Even if you have no interest in gaming but want to connect a second monitor to the A58, you’ll need a dedicated graphics card as there’s only one VGA output.

If the 320GB hard disk is too small for your needs, you’ll need to replace it as there’s no room for another disk. There’s no space for another optical drive or memory card reader either, but there is a spare memory slot to add an extra 2GB of RAM. Accessing the A58’s interior takes no time at all. Pressing a pair of pressure switches allows the case to be flipped open. The cages holding the hard disk and optical drive flip up for easy access and the drives slide out for easy replacement.

If your primary concern is getting a cheap PC with a decent warranty for your business, the ThinkCentre A58 is a good choice.