Lenovo Introduces Dual-screen Notebook

Wes Williams, the ThinkPad's marketing manager, said businesspeople have grown accustomed to the convenience of two screens at their workplaces. The new ThinkPad, he said, will ensure that their work "isn't compromised when they go mobile."

W700ds has the best components available, starting with a 2.53-GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme processor that has four independent processing cores, 6MB of L2 cache and 64-bit operations. There's also 4GB of memory, an 8X DVD burner and a pair of 250GB, 5,400-rpm hard drives that are set up to stripe data across the disks (higher-performance 7,200-rpm drives are also an option). Whether it's for working with a CAD file or making sense of a large Excel file, no notebook on sale today even comes close to this computational monster.

It took me a little while to get used to the dual-screen setup, but I found that it worked surprisingly well. You can physically angle the smaller screen as well as drag and drop items between the two displays.

At one point, I dedicated the smaller screen to watching for incoming e-mails, while I worked with Word, Excel and PowerPoint on the main screen. Then I set the notebook up with a Photoshop image on the main screen and the application's color and brush controls on the smaller display. Later, I used the entire field of view and worked with a large 3-D CAD model while monitoring an eBay auction.