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PC maker Lenovo turned in a strong financial performance for its fourth fiscal quarter, with revenue, profits, and PC shipments all seeing notable jumps.

For the quarter that ended March 31, Lenovo said that profits attributable to shareholders grew 133 percent to $140 million from the same period a year ago. That figure includes $36 million in net profit from the sale of discontinued operations (its mobile handset business). Earnings per diluted share hit $1.44, a rise of 112 percent.

Revenue for the three-month period rose 13 percent to $3.7 billion.

China-based Lenovo said that worldwide PC shipments grew 21 percent, ahead of the industry average growth rate.

Notebook PCs outpaced desktops for the quarter, with notebooks making up 61 percent of total sales versus 38 percent for desktops. Notebook shipments were up 38 percent, while desktop shipments were up 9 percent.

The company's Greater China business accounted for 34 percent of total sales during the quarter, while its Americas business accounted for 27 percent, slightly ahead of the percentage for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Asia-Pacific sales excluding China accounted for 15 percent of sales.

Lenovo first introduced its new consumer notebook line, IdeaPad, back at CES in January. Now, the smallest--and arguably best-looking--of the bunch is set to ship to consumers very soon.

The U110, Lenovo's foray into consumer-oriented ultraportable notebooks, is now available on Lenovo.com, with other retailers soon to follow.

The U110 IdeaPad from Lenovo.

(Credit: Lenovo)

The U110 comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.6-gigahertz processor, 120GB hard drive, 2GB of RAM, and comes loaded with Vista Home Premium.

The screen is 11 inches wide with no bezel and weighs in at a mere 2.4 pounds. The battery life with the original battery is 2 hours, which leaves a lot to be desired. (But the extra battery increases your mobile computing time to 8 hours, Lenovo's vice president of consumer products, Mike Kuptz, assures me.)

The U110 also comes with Dolby-branded sound with four speakers plus a subwoofer, as well as an integrated camera with face-recognition software so a person's face can be used in place of a password.

But the look is what will lure most potential buyers in. Lenovo's clearly spent a lot of time trying to make their ultraportable standout from its all-gloss white/black/pink competitors. The U110 comes in red or black, but has a great vine-patterned texture on the outside lid. The price, however, is not nearly as appealing. The basic version is $1,899. That's more than a MacBook Air, which is aimed at essentially the same market: the person who's always on the go.

The U110 will be sold in some national retail chains, like Office Depot, Micro Center, and Tiger Direct stores, but it won't be available at the largest outlets for notebook sales, Circuit City or Best Buy stores. It will, however, be available at BestBuy.com, NewEgg.com, TigerDirect, and others.

Make sure to check out the CNET Reviews hands-on video here.

ThinkPad X300's solid-state drive beats fast hard drives.

(Credit: Lenovo)

Solid-state drives continue to outperform hard-disk drives in tests, providing some consolation for the high price.

The X300 ThinkPad, which starts at $2,900, is one of the hottest--and most expensive--notebooks on the market now. The Apple MacBook Air is another. They both come with solid-state drives (SSDs) that perform better than standard magnetic hard-disk drives. And the X300's outpaces a 7200rpm hard drive by a long shot, according to review site Hot Hardware.

In a test, the X300's SSD "performed 2.75 times faster than the Dell XPS M1730 running dual 7200rpm drives," the review said. That's not all. "The X300's performance was nearly 4.9x faster than the Asus U6S" with a 5400rpm 160GB hard drive.

Lenovo puts it this way: "Faster boot and application load times, extra durability, and longer battery life." You can add stratospherically higher unit price, but the price impediment will diminish over the next 12 months.

SSDs are based on flash memory chip technology and have no moving parts. Hard drives, in contrast, use read-write heads that hover over spinning platters to access and record data. With no moving parts, SSDs avoid both the risk of mechanical failure and the mechanical delays of hard drives. Therefore, SSDs are generally faster and more reliable.

Lenovo used a boatload of resources to win the contest to design the Olympic torch for this summer's Games, and what's the world's reaction? Derision and anger.

Of course, it has nothing to do with Lenovo or the torch design and everything to do with China's human rights record, its crackdown on protesters in Tibet, and its ongoing support of Sudan's government.

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at how Lenovo's $100 million-plus marketing blitz as one of the official sponsors of the Games held in its own backyard could actually be a major blunder from a brand perspective.

Lenovo executives apparently expected some protests, but were "caught off guard" by the animosity the torch was met with during the traditional relay, particularly in London, Paris, and San Francisco. But Lenovo still has several months to go before the Games begin, and the company is adamant its association with the Games and with China won't hurt its aspirations of becoming a global PC brand name on the level of Hewlett-Packard and Dell.

See the Journal story for more.

Gizmodo got its hands on what appears to be a photo and detailed specs on Lenovo's lineup of new ThinkPad laptops.

See the photo here.

Looks like the X300 will get some company.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

It looks as though both the T- and R-series of Lenovo laptops will be updated this fall, and even more interesting, the first laptop to come standard with a solid-state drive, super-slim X300, will be part of a larger family of notebooks, including an 12-inch X200, 14-inch X400, and 15-inch X500.

Apparently, there will also be a new notebook series introduced, the W-series, intended as a workstation replacement.

Gizmodo does appear to be hedging a bit, calling the information "unconfirmed."

First seen at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the mystery handheld Lenovo was showing off now has a name.

The IdeaPad U8 was unveiled at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai Tuesday along with a few more tidbits about what it's packing inside.

(Credit: Lenovo)

We already learned at CES that it runs Linux, is Web-enabled, has GPS, plays music, and takes photos.

By the name, IdeaPad, we can assume it's a consumer device, since IdeaPad is the name of Lenovo's newest line of consumer-oriented notebooks. We also know now that Intel considers it an MID (mobile Internet device), and it uses Intel's new Atom processor. The IdeaPad U8 also uses a touchscreen display, and will run some Microsoft Office applications.

Check out this video over at UMPC Portal of the U8 in action.

It's still only available in China. Western consumers have largely ignored MIDs like the Samsung Q1 and others, due to a combination of low power, less-than-desirable battery life, and awkward form factor, though the combination Atom processors and Linux could possibly change that if it were to make its way here eventually.

Click here for more stories on IDF Shanghai.

The latest incarnation of the ThinkPad makes its official debut Tuesday.

The X300 from Lenovo is, you may have heard, rather waiflike in size.

Something else that fits in a manila envelope.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Weighing in at just under 3 pounds and measuring less than three quarters of an inch at its skinniest point, the X300 has already been poked and prodded by plenty of tech reviewers.

CNET's own Michelle Thatcher called it her "new BFF" of ultraportables. See for yourself whether promises of 10-hour battery life, a 64GB solid-state drive, a variety of ports, and a starting price of $2,799 are charming enough to lure you in too.

Check out Michelle's full review here.

Like many of you, my copies of Windows XP crash with the now-classic "blue screen of death" (BSOD). When this happened a couple times recently to a new ThinkCentre A61 tower, I called Lenovo tech support. As the title of this posting suggests, it did not go well.

When Windows XP crashes, the default behavior is to create a minidump, a small file (only 88K) with a summary of, hopefully, the most important information about the failure. I wrote about minidumps back in November (see Dealing with software crashes, Part 2). If your copy of Windows has crashed (aka "blue-screened") in the past, you may find a minidump describing the problem in the C:\WINDOWS\Minidump folder. The format of the filename is MiniMMDDYY-99.DMP (the last two numbers being a sequence number).

Minidumps are in a binary format, opening them with Notepad is a waste of time. Windows XP doesn't include the necessary software (program Dumpchk.exe) to open a minidump file. The target audience for a minidump is a tech support person.

But, it seems Lenovo didn't get the memo.

When I spoke to a Lenovo technician on the phone, I was told they don't do that. That is, they aren't allowed to accept minidump files from customers. Instead, the debugging session is totally verbal. Been there, done that. Verbal debugging of computer problems over the phone is all but guaranteed to be a waste of time. It was in this case.

Although the minidump can be impenetrable, the Windows event log, specifically the System event log, also has information about Windows crashes. Shown below is the identifying information about the two Windows crashes I experienced.

At this point you have more information than the Lenovo tech support person assisting me had. He was only interested in the two error codes, not any of the additional data fields shown above in parentheses, which provide additional information about the problem.

While the System event log doesn't provide much information about the crash itself, taken together, the six event logs can provide a wealth of information about the overall goings-on inside Windows. Like the minidump files, the event logs are not very big; in XP they max out at 512K by default. You can see them below for the computer in question.

Six different event log files in Windows XP

Lenovo's technicians are also not allowed to accept event logs from customers.

What's Your Experience?

Lenovo is only one company of many offering technical support for Windows. What has been your experience in trying to get a technician to review either a minidump or an event log?

Do other computer manufacturers also refuse to accept these small files when offered?
Has a support person ever asked for them?
Is there an equivalent situation with Macs?

Either leave a comment below, or e-mail me at minidump at michaelhorowitz dot com.

And, if anyone works for Lenovo, is this, in fact, the normal procedure or did the person I dealt with not follow the rules?

Debugging operating system crashes can be hard to impossible, especially with the small amount of information in a minidump. But not even trying is disgraceful.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

Despite some anticipation of weakening U.S. consumer confidence, PC shipment growth here nearly doubled between the third and fourth quarters of 2007, to reach 8.8 percent, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker report released Wednesday.

Dell actually expanded its market share in the fourth quarter, after a string of disappointing quarters while it reshuffled its ranks and its product lineup. Dell used momentum derived from its new retail push to drive its shipments up by more than 15 percent in the quarter--growth far ahead of the rest of the U.S. The Texas PC maker finished the year with 29.6 percent of the total PC market in the U.S. in the fourth quarter, IDC said.

"From a Dell perspective, part of going from minus-5-percent to 15-percent positive (growth) this quarter is the fact that year-ago shipment was pretty low," said Loren Loverde, director of IDC's quarterly PC report. "So some of that is factoring in, but they have also launched a lot of new products, and lot of new (retail) channel arrangements."

Acer also made a big push in retail this year, continuing the rapid gains in the U.S. (it's grown 294 percent since the same quarter a year ago), and appears to have finally nailed down its coveted No. 3 spot in the worldwide ranking of top PC vendors. When combined with Gateway, Acer shipments achieved 9.6 percent share worldwide in Q4, compared with 6.9 percent a year ago.

Though Lenovo has been nipping at its heels, Acer's most direct competition in the U.S. is the two big guys--Hewlett-Packard and Dell. "HP has a lot more experience with consumers and is going to try to defend that turf. It's a pretty dynamic competitive space all around," Loverde said.

HP, the worldwide PC leader for more than a year now, saw its shipments rise both at home and abroad, though it was somewhat affected by stagnating growth in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, according to IDC. It now has 19 percent of the worldwide market.

Lenovo has been going strong for three straight quarters. It ended the year behind Acer with 7.5 percent of worldwide PC shipments. It's not in the top 5 of vendors in the U.S. market, but recently introduced its new IdeaPad consumer notebook line, which the company hopes will follow in the tradition of its business-oriented ThinkPad line of laptops.

Rival analyst firm Gartner ranks the companies in the same order as IDC, according to findings also released Wednesday: the worldwide leader is HP (with 18.2 percent market share), followed by Dell (14.3), Acer (8.9), Lenovo (7.4), and Toshiba (4.0) to round out the top 5.

In the U.S., it's Dell (31.4 percent market share), HP (26.1), Acer (9), Apple (6.1), and Toshiba (5.3). Apple has stretched its share of the U.S. market to 6.1 percent, from 5.1 percent a year ago. Gartner also notes that for the second consecutive quarter mobile PC shipments exceeded those of desktops.

Though the market for computers--and both business and consumer technology across the board--appears healthy, it could drop off next year. But thus far, there are no signs of it in the PC space.

Though there's been ample hand-wringing over interest rates, credit problems, and weak retail sales, the computing industry is staying immune so far, according to Loverde.

"There's some risk of having an impact on PCs, but a certain amount of it is because we just went through the holiday season and Wall Street is under pressure," he said. "If you look at the broader technology trends...some recovery in 2007, commercial Vista adoption, pretty strong portable (PC) adoption, (and) we're still getting lower prices and new users...A number of tech environment factors that suggest we should expect still some pretty solid growth. The risk that we might not maintain double digit growth in the next couple years would be if we had a recession and consumer spending really started to cut back."