[ Background music ] >> Rich Brown: Hi I'm Rich Brown Senior Editor for CNET.com. Today we're gonna take a look at the Lenovo C300. This is a lower end all in one and we would definitely consider this system a net top, the primary reason being that it's so cheap, it comes in about 549 and it's based on Intel's Atom CPU, the chip we're used to seeing in Netbooks. Now perhaps the cheap thing you may notice about this system just by looking at it is that it has a pretty large screen for a low end all in one. 20 inches lets you watch movies from a distance. The black levels aren't great. The screen looks a little bit faded out depending and the audio output is really pretty weak also so that sort of limits its convenience factor. You can't just really plop it down in the middle of a kitchen and expect to blast audio you know all over the room so this is definitely not a high end movie watching device but it will work in a pinch. Mostly though we think it's too slow for its price and in general we're down on net tops as a category. We think either a standard budget PC give you a lot more performance for the dollar or a Netbook gives you that portability bring a system in the kitchen or wherever you want and for the same low price and roughly the same performance and features. So we'll quickly go over the features here. You can see up here there's a web cam. Lenovo puts in media card reader over here on the side as well as a pair of USB ports. There's a DVD burner slot over here on the right side. There's a few features in front that are handy. There's a power button standard. There's a screen power button which is nice as well as hard volume controls. On the back of this system you can see the ports are relatively straight forward. There's a handful of USB ports, standard analog audio jacks as well as a mini fire wire port and an Ethernet port for a hard internet connections. There is also wireless built into the system. Overall though and like we said we really can't get behind a net top computer in general be it from Lenovo or any other vendor for that matter. The performance in our lab with this system with its Atom chip was up to 10 times slower than we found in a $450 budget PC and again because you have to add speakers to turn it into a movie watching system sort of the convenience factor of this PC and the benefits of its large screen are lost. You put this down in the kitchen you have to have speakers all of a sudden it's a very crowded counter and a Netbook would do that much easier and with less clutter. [ Background music ] >> Rich Brown: So I'm Rich Brown this is the Lenovo C300. [Music]
