Lenovo's new ThinkCentre A61e is primarily a business PC, but it also has crossover appeal as a home office system, given its small size -- which echoes that of the Mac Mini and other recent, small-scale desktops.

Unfortunately, Lenovo's new ThinkCentre does not share the Mac Mini's versatility, either in features or performance -- the latter perhaps a casualty of this system's energy-conscious design. We commend Lenovo for giving large-scale IT buyers an environmentally-considerate alternative with this system, but if you were envisioning a one-off purchase for personal use, Apple, HP and Dell all offer better options.

Performance
The ThinkCentre A61e is only the most recent entry in the growing trend of scaled-down desktops such as Apple's Mac Mini and Dell's Inspiron 531s. All trade some or all of their expandability for smaller chassis. The Mac Mini is the smallest of these systems, with the Inspiron taking up the most space.

At 27.5cm wide by 24.2cm deep by 8.1cm high, the ThinkCentre A61e lands in the middle, at about twice the overall volume of the Mac Mini. Given the ThinkCentre's corporate roots, it doesn't quite have the aesthetic polish of those other systems, but its small size minimises any offence you might take to its utilitarian looks.

With the Business version of Windows Vista, the ThinkCentre A61e gets remote desktop capability. That's a useful business feature, depending on your needs, but if you're looking at these systems from a combination business/SOHO standpoint, remote desktop access doesn't offset the Inspiron 531's faster performance, larger hard drive or Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities. You get wired Gigabit Ethernet with the ThinkCentre A61e, of course, but that's the only networking connection that came with our review system.

And it's not just Dell that trumps the ThinkCentre A61e on performance. We found a variety of similarly priced and less-expensive systems that trounced the Lenovo system on our benchmark tests. Even a budget eMachines system was faster across the board. We attribute this poor performance mostly to the ThinkCentre's slow CPU and moderate 1GB of RAM.

The ThinkCentre's Athlon BE-2350 CPU does come from AMD's power-efficient line, so in large deployments (and in businesses where PC performance doesn't matter), it's likely that a company would save money on power bills. But if you buy just one, the power consumption savings aren't enough to justify such a performance hit, and you can get much faster systems for less from other vendors.

Like the other small-chassis PCs, the ThinkCentre A61e also makes compromises in its expandability to achieve its small size. The tool-free case on this system is easy enough to get into, and you can even separate the computer into two different pieces (we suspect for quick part-swapping by IT departments). Once you're inside, you can switch out the laptop-style memory and the hard drive, and that's about it.

That's more than the Mac Mini, which gives you no internal access, but unlike the slightly larger Dell Inspiron 531s and HP's SlimLine desktops, you get no half-height expansion card slots for making upgrades. Lenovo does offer options for an ExpressCard slot and a media card reader, but both are available only by special bids for corporate buyers.

Corporate compatibility
A corporate PC comes with a variety of software tools designed to help an IT department manage that system. For individual users, these are generally less useful, although some of Lenovo's software actually has some handy features. Lenovo's ThinkVantage suite works as a sort of secondary program menu, giving you easy access to various utilities and programs, including the bundled DVD and audio software.

It's no replacement for Windows Media Center (which is absent from Vista Business), but it's at least convenient to have them wrapped together. This suite also features quick links to various system tools, which mirrors similar applications we've seen on PCs from other vendors lately. Lenovo also has an update application for making sure all of your software remains current, as well as a Vista-independent recovery program in case you need to start from scratch.

Lenovo's warranty for this system is three years of parts-and-labour coverage. The company also offers telephone support and a variety of system-specific support resources on its web site.