Q700 Sff E5400 500GB Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I purchased the Lenovo Q700 to use exclusively as a home theater PC.Its small size and black finish make an unobtrusive addition to the livingroom decor.My only complaint about its appearance are the bright blue flashing lights on the front which indicate power-on/sleep state, and disk activity.I'm looking for some translucent tape to cover the LEDs to reduce their intensity.

The Q700 is very quiet.The internal fan and hard disk drive produce a barely perceptible sound; nothing to spoil the movie watching experience.

It comes with a nice remote control for Windows Media Center, but like the remotes for my other HT components, it's been replaced by a universal remote (URC RF20). The supplied keyboard has a nice feel and a look of quality, but the keys have to be pressed down hard to ensure registration.I replaced the included keyboard and mouse with more appropriate wireless versions which I can use from the sofa on rare occasions.The Windows interface grahics and text is a bit to small to read comfortably from a distance of 10+ feet even on a large screen TV.

The Q700 comes loaded with Windows 7 and Windows Media Center.This was my first experience with either and I'm impressed with design and performance of these Microsoft products.My one wish is that it be possible to more easily customized the WMC menus to better match my HTPC setup.I prefer the MediaBrowser add-on for accessing my movie library.I was able to hide the unneeded WMC "Movies" menu item, but only by editing the Windows registry. This is not something a novice should expect to do.

The Q700 performs well as an HTPC.I cannot think of any situations where the Intel Dual Core was unable to keep up with the processing load.Any lack of responsiveness in the WMC interface can be attributed to the universal remote, not the PC itself.

The built-in TV tuner is very good.It performs as well as the my Samsung HDTV tuner. I use it as my primary tuner so that all TV functions are included in the WMC interface.I wish the PC was equipped with a second tuner so that I could watch another channel when a TV program is being recorded.As is, one has to switch over to the HDTV tuner to watch a different channel, a more complex operation than I prefer.

Another minor complaint about the Q700 is that the analog audio outputs are not parallel to the HDMI output.If a line is plugged into the green audio output jack on the back of the Q700, the audio to the HDMI is interrupted.The same is true for the front audio (headphone) jack.I wanted to feed the analog audio output to the whole house audio amplifier.As is, the lines have to be manually plugged in whenever whole house audio is desired.

Depending on your intended use of the HTPC, the 500 GB hard disk drive may not be adequate for storage of music and video.My movie library contains only 160 DVD quality movies which consume about 600 GB.I don't know how easy it is to replace the Q700's HDD with a larger capacity drive.I decided to include network accessible storage (NAS), expandable to several terabytes, to accommodate my expanding movie and music library storage requirements.

In my opinion, buying an HTPC like the Lenovo Q700 is preferable to using a standard desktop PC or tying your home theater into your office PC using an extender.A standard desktop PC is too noisy and consumes a lot of power compared to a device like the Q700.Using an extender (like the HP X280N, if you can find one these days) will reduce overall performance of your system and make unavailable some WMC features.

I highly recommend the Lenovo Q700 as an HTPC.

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Product Description:
Take your music, gaming and movie experience to a new high with the compact Lenovo IdeaCentre Q700 30151NU Desktop PC. The Lenovo IdeaCentre Q700 30151NU Desktop PC, with full HD support and smooth playback enabled by an Intel® Pentium processor, can be connected to your television with a single HDMI cable. Cinema enthusiasts can integrate this versatile PC at home with their own surround sound audio equipment via the dedicated S/PDIF port for flawless digital audio output.

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