IBM Australia Lenovo ThinkCentre M51

For corporate environments where reliability and security are the most important issues when rolling out new desktops, Lenovo is hard to overlook. Its range of ThinkCentre M51 desktops incorporate hardware user authentication via Lenovo's Embedded Security Subsystem 2.0 and Client Security Software wizard, which aims to protect your data from local and remote unauthorised access. It supports data encryption on-the-fly and can be used in conjunction with an optional smart card or fingerprint reader for extra security. It also features Lenovo's Rescue and Recovery suite, which is a set of programs that can restore the desktop and back up data through a very intuitive user interface.

Physically, the M51 is a desktop (not a tower) that occupies a large footprint, yet still has a cable locking facility and also features an internal tamper switch.

Our World Bench 5 scores revealed sluggish performance from this PC, whose cornerstone is a 915G chipset-based motherboard and a Pentium 4 530 (3GHz) CPU, along with 512MB of DDR memory, an 80GB hard drive and integrated graphics. This configuration is plenty for everyday office tasks such as creating presentations, working on spreadsheets and using Internet services, but anything more than that, particularly tasks involving lots of graphics data, and the system will struggle.

The included Rescue and Recovery software can be used to create an "image" of the data on your hard drive, or onto CD using the installed DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive.

The versatile connectivity options include a full complement of legacy ports, plus a DVI port and USB 2.0 ports. For ease of use, it has two front-accessible USB 2.0 ports.