Late Wednesday night Lenovo announced the upcoming launch of its Enhanced Experience (EE3) Version 3 for Windows 7, promising a 24-second boot up time for its line of Lenovo Think and Idea-branded PCs. EE3 will become a standard feature on a wide range of Think and Idea-branded PCs that will ship to retailers beginning in April.
"Customers using traditional spinning disk hard drive (HDD) on Lenovo PCs can start their PC on average 40 percent faster than typical Windows 7 PC1 users, thanks to Lenovo’s RapidBoot technology, featured on all EE3 certified Lenovo PCs," the company said. "RapidBoot uses optimized processes and hardware settings to allow Lenovo PCs to boot up faster."
Lenovo said that its EE3 certified PCs boot up in 24 seconds on average, while the typical Windows 7 PC trails with an average time of 41 seconds. Customers will be able to tell if a Lenovo PC is EE3 equipped by looking for the special Lenovo Enhanced Experience 3 for Windows 7 certification sticker affixed to them. Lenovo’s upcoming IdeaPad U310 and U410 Ultrabooks and IdeaCentre A720 all-in-one desktop will be among the first EE3 products to hit the market.
So what exactly is EE3? It consists of two factors: RapidBoot and BootShield. The former tech features smart defragmentation which defragments the area of the hard disk drive that contains the boot files used to load Windows, and an HDD accelerator which uses the RAM as a cache for boot files.
"Hundreds of drivers have been reconfigured to improve performance," Lenovo said. "Proprietary BIOS development reduces BIOS post time. Non-essential Windows 7 services are delayed until after the boot process is complete. Preinstalled software (like antivirus) is compiled and imaged. And finally, we use only the highest quality for key components like graphics, hard drive, and memory, which drastically increases performance."
BootShield is only available on Lenovo's notebooks. It checks the availability of system resources during the boot process and selectively pauses the launch of additional software until resources are freed up or until the user manually launches the specific program. This will be a huge help later on as the device gets older and the user piles on even more software which can decrease system performance and boot times.
"Time is precious, and when it comes to your PC, we want to make sure that every second counts, and reduce the wait time it takes to get your PC up and running," said Mark Cohen, distinguished engineer and vice president, Lenovo. "The EE3 optimizations we’ve made on our consumer and business PCs mean customers will spend less time waiting and more time doing what they want to do, with faster boot time performance and quicker resume times for a more instant-on experience."
As stated, look for the special Lenovo Enhanced Experience 3 for Windows 7 certification sticker affixed to new Think and Idea-branded PCs starting in April.
