![]() ![]() All restore functions are included in the BIOS in case you need to do a factory restore.While it's fine for conferencing and movie watching, the ThinkPad T440s offers unpleasant music playback. Our W550s came with Windows 8.1 installed so we did not receive any disks with our unit, which is just fine with us. The display on the W550s is just as good as the W540 and it does include touchscreen capabilities, which is nice if you like to use some of the features of Windows 8. Even though we do not watch many DVD movies, we often have the need to burn an ISO disk image, which we could not do with this unit. We also used the W550s in our lab and would have liked to see a DVD drive in the W550s. Battery life and running cool is where the W550s really shines. It was not unconformable to have the W550s on our lap while taking notes. The W550s also ran much cooler than the W540 we tested. We went through airports, in flights, at the hotel and at meetings without even coming close to running the batteries down, they just kept going. The next benefit we saw was battery life, the W550s can run all day without even coming close to running out of power. We used our W550s on several trips and found that it performed very well in our usual workloads, office apps and Photoshop work. If you needed to do heavy duty video work or encoding, you might want to take a look at the W540 instead because the CPU's you can pick from can have as many as 4 cores or double what you can get with the W550s. We were rather surprised to see only dual-core processors available for the W500 which somewhat limit mobile workstation use, but overall the Intel Core i7-5600U processor that came equipped with our review unit was able to keep up with us just fine. The feature load out and bundled software is typical for Lenovo devices so we had no surprises there. The W550s comes equipped with just about everything you would want. The ThinkPad W550s Mobile Workstation was a very powerful laptop to use while we had the review unit. To bring up the BIOS, power up or restart the W550s, during the boot process a screen will be displayed that says hit enter to go into the BIOS.Ī word of warning here, do not change settings if you do not fully understand the effects of doing so. This is the heart of the system and several key features found here that you could adjust. However if you plan to upgrade to additional HDD space this becomes a nice feature to have. We do not have a HDD installed in our W550s to protect by this. The system has an integrated motion sensor that continuously monitors the movement of the notebook, and, if a sudden change in motion is detected, it temporarily stops the hard drive to protect it from a potential crash. The Active Protection System can detect sudden changes in motion and temporarily stop the hard drive to help protect your valuable data from some crashes that could occur due to everyday notebook accidents. Here is the pre-installed software that we had installed on this W540:Ĭlicking the Airbag button brings up this screen. In the case of the W540, we did not find any junk apps but we did find apps that you should take a careful look at too decided if you want to keep it. ![]() Much of that is only a trial and software that we are not interested in using. On many of the laptops we have used in the past, there is a fair amount of junk stuff. The first thing that many people do is take a look at the bundled software that comes pre-installed on the laptop they purchase and start uninstalling the bulk of it. The W540 does make a little more noise, but overall both these laptops run nice and quiet with the W550s take the lead as a low noise laptop. We found ambient room noise to be about equal to the sound output of the W550s and it was just becoming noticeable when we had the fans set to 100% and then under full load. The W550s really hardly makes any noise, even under full workloads. Sound output measured sitting in our chair and the meter placed at head level. ![]()
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