Information Systems:Lenovo PC hardware

Overview

Historically, we have always purchased IBM and Lenovo hardware for desktop and laptop PCs. This page talks about Lenovo-specific concerns when it comes to the administration of PC hardware. Servers are excluded as they are best discussed in another article.

Administration

Lenovo Vantage

Lenovo Vantage (previously System Update), is pre-installed software (on most new machines) that aims to be an all-in-one utility for Lenovo PCs. This includes warranty maintenance (indicates expiry and allows for purchase of extended/upgraded warranty plans), driver updates, device info (e.g battery health), and feature control (performance mode, audio tuning etc). There is an enterprise way to deploy and manage Vantage, but that is perhaps not warranted in our environment. Instead, the admin should have a process to go in once a while and run Vantage so that a) Vantage itself udpates, and b) driver and utility updates are kept up to date.

Windows 10 OEM edition

Like most PC makers, Lenovo PCs come with their own flavor (branding) of Windows. Previously - and also because we used Windows Entperise instead of Pro - the OEM Windows installation was immediately wiped after purchase and replaced with our custom Windows image. Having moved away from Enterprise to now using Pro, there isn't a need for us to do this anymore. The installation is indeed slightly different from the other PCs that were installed with vanilla Windows 10 Pro, but it's not a significant deviation.

Other notes

Nano form-factor PCs

In 2020/2021, ThinkCentre Nano PCs were deployed, which are ultra-small form-factor PCs (even smaller than the now-mainstream "ThinkCentre Tiny"). Deployment of this PC type is a drastic deviation from previous convention, which involved traditional form-factor and slim form-factor desktops. Even for Lenovo, these seem experimental, as they are slower to update the Nano product line (e.g. still carry 8th-gen CPUs when 11th-gen is the current). The verdict on if these become the norm is still out, but these PCs function superbly and needless to say meets the need of the company.