The Mandelbear's Musings

Lenovo announces the ultrasmall, low-energy Blue Sky desktop PC

September 12, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Lenovo Group Ltd. today announced the Blue Sky desktop computer, its smallest, quietest and most energy-efficient desktop.

Available at an introductory price of about $399 after rebate, the new ThinkCentre A61e (its formal name) ships next month. About the size of a telephone book, it weighs 8 lbs. and is about 25% smaller than the previous ThinkCentre model, Lenovo officials said.

Blue Sky is also the first full-functioning PC to run on 45 watts of power, meaning it can be powered by a solar panel or roughly the amount of electricity needed for three compact fluorescent light bulbs, a Lenovo spokeswoman said.

It will run either the Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Athlon 64x2 dual-core processor or the AMD Sempron processor, with several choices of ultrasmall hard drives, ranging from 80GB to 750GB. It has 4GB of memory and comes preloaded with either the Windows Vista Business or Windows XP Professional operating system.

The question is: is it really quiet? Gizmodo has more detailed specs. And there's no PCI slot, so it's not much use for studio recording, but I have that covered anyway.