The Lenovo IdeaPad Z570 comes with a metal shell similar to the IdeaPad Z360 we reviewed last year and includes the latest technology inside. Lenovo has added the 13″ IdeaPad Z370 to the website, but it isn’t available for purchase just yet.

The IdeaPad Z570 has a 2.1GHz 2nd Generation Intel Core i3-2310M processor, 4GB RAM, a 500GB hard drive and Intel Integrated HD 3000 graphics. The 15.6″ display has a 1366 x 768 resolution and comes with an integrated camera. The Z570 has a built in Dula Layer DVD burner, 6-cell battery, WiFi and Bluetooth 2.1.

The IdeaPad Z570 is billed as an entertainment notebook, which is a bit different from the typical multimedia notebook moniker. Basically this means that while the Z570 has no discrete graphics card, the built in Intel HD 3000 GPU should provide enough power for most casual users to entertain themselves. The new second generation Intel Core i family of processors include the graphics chip right on the same piece of silicon as the CPU.

This means that you can get a lot more power from these new processors in the graphics department. We wouldn’t suggest them for playing a title like Call of Duty Black Ops, but if you want to play games like Mafia II or Just Cause 2, you should be good to go on a medium setting based on test units we have used.

The IdeaPad Z570 is available for purchase starting at $699, if you need more power you can opt for a 2.5GHz Intel core i5 Sandy Bridge processor with 6GB RAM for $999.

IdeaPad Z570 Overview Video:

Lenovo IdeaPad Z570 Up For Sale With Metal Body at $699 is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

There is no specific reasoning why these games are not available by default, but one could guess because of their targeted audience and environment, Microsoft chose to have them disabled. Thankfully, if you want to play, you can turn games back on easily in business versions of Windows 7.

How to Enable Missing Games in Windows 7

Click Start, type: turn windows

Hit Enter on your keyboard

After the components of Turn Windows features on or off load, check the Games folder or expand it and check off the games you want to play.

Click OK to confirm changes

If you are connected to a Windows Server Domain with policies set in place that might prevent you from accessing the Turn Windows features on or off components, you will need to contact your Administrator for assistance.

If you’re at work, don’t let your boss catch you!

How to Enable Missing Games in Windows 7 (Quick Tip) is a post by Andre from Notebooks.com.

But the real question is; Can Apple TV 2.0 evolve from the realm of a Cupertino plaything, to a viable and worthy entertainment device? A device ready to sit atop your television set along with the likes of the Roku Box, Google TV and the many other streaming Internet video solutions now showing up or soon to be showing up in living rooms.

The simple is answer is, maybe one day, but not today.

The Apple TV is a very small and easy to hook up box for streaming television, movies, and other Internet video. At $99 it has great value for the cost if a buyer wants to stream Netflix, YouTube video, content from an iTunes library, and content supplied by Apple like 99 cent HD TV show rentals and HD movies for rent or purchase.

Only Fox and ABC are part of the TV rental side of things leaving a huge void. Other TV chiefs don’t want to rent their content for only a buck, the price of most TV show rentals. Jeff Zucker of NBC, for example, said it would devalue” their shows. You can still buy shows from other networks, but that will cost more.

For movie watchers, Apple will rent the latest release and many older files for between $5 for new releases and usually about $4 for older titles. That price point feels a little high for rental, when one could go over to Amazon and download and own a movie like Iron Man 2 for only $15 or rent it for just $4. Of course you would have to have either a TV that is capable of connecting to their video service or the Apple TV competitor, the Roku Box. Also Apple’s rental policy only gives customers 24 hours to view the show while Amazon provides 48 hours before the download is locked again.

Lets look at what Apple engineers got right. The on-screen interface is attractive and simple to use. It is mostly dark which makes the thumbnails and movie cover images show up nicely. The text was somewhat easy to read across the room on my 32-inch Samsung HDTV from about eight feet away. If I had sight problems it might get challenging to read things like the video descriptions.

One thing I really like is the multiple sources of reviews for movies and shows. You not only get Rotten Tomatoes reviews for movies, but iTunes reviews as well. I love the Rotten Tomatoes site and rely on it a lot for picking movies. It is nice to have right there from within the Apple TV interface. The service takes a number of professional reviewers and adds them to customer reviews to offer a percentage score. In my experience, if a movie scores over 80% it is almost always a winner. If it scores below 50% I usually hate it.

Hooking up the Apple TV to my  network was simple. Stream was rock solid when connected to a network via Ethernet. The only problem I had was dropped connections after coming out of sleep mode when the Apple TV was hooked up to my network via Wi-Fi. But after re-entering my login information Video played over both wired and wireless looked like it was running locally from attached storage even though no movies are stored on the Apple TV. There wasn’t any slow down or picture problems. Only a couple of times in many hours of watching was there a minor problem with the video and audio being slightly out of sync. I stopped the show and restarted it and it improved a lot the first time, but the second time this happened it didn’t. This was while connected via Ethernet. I am not sure if it was the Apple TV or Netflix that was the problem. I suspect it may have been Netflix since it never happened while playing content from my iTunes library, YouTube or rented shows or movies from Apple.

Speaking of Netflix, the Apple TV will display more than just Apple content. There is Netflix, which for just $8.95 per month, the Apple TV will serve up anything that can be watched over a computer with their Watch Instantly feature. The Apple TV Netflix interface is great better than the Roku experience. It is far better than my Samsung Blu-ray player which also serves up Netflix content.

In addition to Netflix there is YouTube. If a user subscribes to a channel, those videos will show up in the YouTube interface. So, if you want to subscribe to our website videos, check out our channel on YouTube. Thanks to the Apple TV I have discovered some interesting content amidst all the ridiculous cat videos or children biting each other on the ear. Other content from the Internet menu item includes Podcasts, pictures or other content from a user’s MobileMe or Flickr feed, and Internet Radio.

The Apple TV itself is amazingly small. There is an HDMI cable to hook up to a TV. The power cord is just that a cord no power brick to get in the way of other plugs. With its size, it could make a great portable entertainment device that one could take over to a friend’s house or on the road with a Pico projector shining on the wall of a hotel room.

The remote is very small, but the buttons are all at one end so it feels good in the hand. Even someone with big paws like me was able to use it without any problem. It is very minimalist with only a circle directional button. The left and right sides of the circle are for rewind and fast forward. Up and down bring up other thins like chapter tick marks, etc. There is a menu button and a play/pause button. That’s it.

Using the tiny remote to enter long user names or passwords is not easy. Most of the time login credentials only have to be entered once. One exception was when entering Wi-Fi credentials. There were connection issues, which I explain below. For each of the services like Netflix, YouTube, etc., login credentials will have to be entered. Initial setup is a little time-consuming, but the motion over the onscreen keyboard using the directional circle of the remote was quick and easy.

Finally, the way the Apple TV interfaces with iTunes is very simple. All I had to do was turn on Home Sharing from iTunes and go into the settings on the Apple TV and enter may account information. The movies, music and other videos I have in iTunes played without any problems whatsoever. Just like Internet streaming video it looked like the iTunes movies and TV shows I viewed were stored locally rather than streaming over the network.

Most of the time I used a wired connection, but when I unplugged the LAN cable and configured the Wi-Fi settings via my 802.11n network, video still streamed perfectly. It took a few more seconds to cache and then start the video. But it was not annoyingly long. However, there was one annoyance with using Wi-Fi. Each time the Apple TV went to sleep it would lose my Wi-Fi network login information requiring me to enter it each time I used the device.

The Apple TV is not perfect. First, it only has an HDMI out port for connecting to the TV. If a TV does not have HDMI or is not HDCP compliant, then don’t bother. It won’t work. HDCP is a copy protection scheme built into some TVs but not all. Most recent models will work; mine did and it is about 2 years old.

Another issue is the content. First, you cannot buy movies or shows from the device. This is annoying. A way around it is to buy the movie or show on the computer using iTunes first. Then once it is downloaded, stream it from iTunes. This works fine and so I consider this a smaller issue than many are making of it. Still, one problem this introduces is iTunes must be running for this to work. Until I got the Apple TV I didn’t keep iTunes running 24/7 because on the Windows side of things it is resource hog.

The second issue with content, as already mentioned, there are no shows available for rent from networks other than ABC and Fox. And Fox said this is just a trial, so they could be going away. But again, the fact that I can buy the content from iTunes makes this a smaller issue than I originally considered it. Sure, it costs more than three times the $.99 price per show, but like most people I prefer to own, rather than rent, content.

Eventually, users who also own an iPad will be able to download a movie on the iPad and stream it from the iPad to the Apple TV. This is not yet functionally, so that is an annoyance. And there is no way to judge how well this will eventually work until it is implemented in the public release of the iOS 4.2 update for the iPad next month.

In a vacuum, the Apple TV 2.0 is a great entertainment solution. Just a few years ago, I would have killed for such an inexpensive, tiny, easy-to-set-up-and-use device. But in 2010 the Apple TV is not the only game in town.

For about two years I have used a Western Digital TV, which is a small box that hooks up a hard drive to a TV and plays any video, music or pictures from the hard drive. The Apple TV even has a USB port, so we have to wonder why Apple didn’t include this ability? It can stream from iTunes, so there is a workaround.

Now that Western Digital has shipped a version of the WDTV that will also stream content, the Apple TV looks even more limited. The WD TV Live Plus is $50 more than the Apple TV, but that might be worth the price to get the extra features.

WDTV isn’t even the best alternative to the Apple TV. The leader in this segment of tech devices is Roku. I have a previous generation Roku box and I love it. It streams Netflix, YouTube and Internet radio like the Apple TV and WDTV, but it has so many more channels. There is also a newer version that does 1080p video, something the Apple TV doesn’t do.

The Roku box has HDMI and component out, and coming soon, it will add a channel for hulu Plus the streaming TV service. There are three new models starting at $60 and ranging up to $100. Only the most expensive model, which is the same price as the Apple TV and does so much more, will have the USB port (for connecting an external hard drive to watch videos, view pictures, and listen to music stored locally) and component video and optical audio out. The $80 and up models have wireless N networking and a button to quickly skip back for an instant replay, which is nice if another person walks into a room and talks over that important line of dialogue in the movie or show being watched. On all Roku boxes, for movie and TV show rentals there is a channel for Amazon on Demand. I sold my WDTV on eBay to get the previous generation Roku box and am very happy I did. I will likely add a new Roku box so that we can have one on each of our TVs.

The Apple TV has great potential. It was discovered that it runs a version of the iOS that powers the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. It also has 8GB of storage and a mini-USB port, both of which don’t mean much now; but could point to new features down the road.

What might Apple have planned for these two features? I would suspect that like the original iPhone that shipped without the ability to load apps, an Apple TV update will add this feature and the 8GB storage will be used to store these apps. There are a few things that would take the Apple TV 2.0 from my second favorite mini digital media streaming device, behind Roku, to first.

The first is the ability to watch hulu Plus. There is already a great app for doing so which was features as our iPad App of the Week early this year. It’s already coming to the Roku box. Apple TV needs this to compete.

The second feature is the ability to install games. There is a large segment of the population that doesn’t need the power of a Playstation 3 or XBOX. They just want to play casual games. The Apple TV with an iPad or other iOS device as a controller would be a killer feature vaulting the Apple TV way ahead of the Roku or anyone else coming in the future like Boxee or GoogleTV.

Apple may add these two features, but already people are working on doing so via unsupported means. I’m talking about jailbreaking. If hackers” find a way to jailbreak the Apple TV so that it will be able to install apps, then forget everything you just read. Watching hulu Plus or downloading purchased movies to a USB drive connected to the mini USB port and playing games using the iPad or other iOS devices as a controller will make Apple TV 2.0 a better device than the Roku, WDTV, GoogleTV or Boxee. It might make it a competitor to the XBOX 360 and Playstation 3 for people who don’t want to play the highest powered games.

Is Apple TV 2.0 the best solution for a digital streaming media set-top box? My advice is wait till the GoogleTV devices are released and the Boxee Box is released to see how all of tehm stack up. But if you only have $100 and want something now, get the Roku, not the Apple TV.

Pros:

• Plays streaming video/audio/pictures very well
• Netflix & YouTube streaming
• Connects with MobileMe and Flickr for pictures and video
• Streams anything in your iTunes library from a computer
• Video quality is great
• Interface is neat and simple to use
• Small footprint
• Easy to set up
• Runs iOS giving it potential if Apple will unlock it

Cons:

• No Hulu
• Limited TV content (only ABC and FOX)
• Only rents content from Apple directly from device
• Streaming from other iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch) not implemented yet
• Wi-Fi login credentials kept getting lost requiring re-entry
• No hard drive connection
• No support for displays that are not HDCP compliant
• No component video output

Tech Specs

• Up to 720p video output
• H.264, MPEG-4, M-JPEG video formats
• AAC, MP3, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV audio formats
• JPEG, GIF, TIFF picture formats
• Wireless a/b/g/n
• 10/100 Etherent
• HDMI output only for video
• Optical Audio
• Built-in IR receiver
• 6-watt power supply
• .9-inches high, 3.9-inches wide, 3.9-inches deep, .6 lbs
• Comes with aluminum remote, power cord, and documentations

Apple TV Review: Great Potential But Needs More is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.

The 2010 Ford Taurus we took on our Great American Roadtrip 2.0 was equipped with SYNC and many other bits of technology to make our trip easier. Here we take a look at how SYNC connects to multiple devices for communication and entertainment.

The first thing you’ll notice if you test SYNC is that in a world of touchscreen devices — voice and buttons are a welcome way to control them on the road.

After pairing your device to SYNC with Bluetooth or connecting via the car’s USB port you can entertain yourself with whatever you have on the device, or can stream to it. In our case we hooked up the Motorola Droid, HTC Droid Eris and the Apple iPad.

For communication the phones were connected by Bluetooth. While you can pair multiple phones we were only able to use one device at a time to make calls over the built-in speaker system and call SYNC services for weather and directions. When you receive a call you can answer it with a button on the steering wheel and your radio is silenced to allow the call to play over the vehicles 12 Sony speakers. Initiating a call happens with the push of the voice button on the steering wheel and then you speak the name of your contact.

Overall the voice control for calls was easy to use with only one mistaken voice dial in our entire trip; the system was even able correctly match James to Jim when I couldn’t remember how I had a contact entered. Voice recognition was not perfect, we had to repeat ourselves once or twice but it was still one of the better voice control systems I have used.

As for sound quality, vehicle occupants could all hear and talk on the phone call without trouble. While the individual on the other end could tell they were on a speakerphone the reported sound quality was still good.

When it comes to the entertainment we store on our touchscreen devices the SYNC system really shines. You can use voice to switch between Line in, USB and Bluetooth and to control devices connected to the vehicle such as pause, play and next track. We used Bluetooth for most of the trip, but if you plug in via USB you can search for specific artists and tracks on your MP3 player.

These controls made it easy to control music while traveling at 75 MPH through the Dakotas without trying to find the right place to tap on a touchscreen. The SYNC system can control the default media player on your device but with Bluetooth streaming you can listen to much more. We streamed Pandora, Rhapsody and Audible books over the car’s speakers using SYNC and Bluetooth. While the controls can’t skip tracks or pause these apps it is still freeing to hear your music without cords.

When using the full SYNC experience the great part is that phone calls directions and more will take precedence over your music so that your aren’t trying to mute the radio for an incoming call.

In all SYNC is a really cool way to control your communications and entertainment while in the car. It’s nice to be able to connect with any type of device from a Google Android powered smartphone to an iPad or a simple flip phone with Bluetooth like my in-laws use with SYNC in their Ford Taurus.

With controls that are intuitive, many connectivity options and great voice recognition SYNC is a must have option for your next Ford and worth checking out if you’re in the market for a new car.

For more reviews of Road Trip Gear, check out everything we have on the Great American Road Trip 2.0 and follow the NBRoadTrip tag on Notebooks.com.

SYNC Entertainment Hands On Review is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

Windows Media Player 12 features cool interface

The most noticeable difference when you first launch Media Player 12 is the changes to how the UI is now laid out. But before we go into that, lets talk about some of the initial steps to start getting ready:

Setup:

Windows Media Player still comes bundled in Windows, 7. So unlike some applications that were once bundled with the OS but are now a part of the Windows Live Essentials suite, you don’t have to download it. Just like version 11 when you launch the executable for the first time you have a choice between doing a ‘Express’ or ‘Custom’ setup. Of course, I would like to see if there are any new changes, so lets go with the Custom Settings.

Most of the common options you are accustom to seeing during this portion of setup are there, the first change I see is the option to add the Media Player 12 executable to your desktop, which I see a lot of persons do, so looks like a make sense option. Next you can choose to make Media Player your default music or video Player or choose specific file types you would like it to play. Media Player 12 supports numerous formats now, I notice songs that I had to resort to playing in iTunes now play just fine in Media Player eg. MP3 Format Sound and the proprietary AAC.

There are many new supported codec’s making WMP 12 a definite choice for Media.

After you have completed the setup process, you are greeted by the media player, which takes you immediately to the music library. Based on my observations, Media Player adapts a combination of Windows Explorer bread crumb menus which help you to easily back track path ways throughout a folder hierarchy but in this case your music library locations. There is also separation between task and locations as evident by the location arrangements and features like ‘Play’, ‘Burn’ and ‘Sync’ which are now situated on the far right of the interface. The familiar back and forward buttons are still there and makes it easy to move between different areas of the interface.

Below these options you will find a second toolbar which display menus for Organizing, Streaming, creating a playlist, Library Mode and searching in addition to Help. The Navigation Pane situated on the right of the interface is revamped with a new addition. In Media Player 12 Library links such as Year, Rating, Songs are now a part of the library table. You can still find Navigation Pane options under Organize > Customize Navigation Pane. The Recently Added link has been removed. Two new library links Video and Pictures are available providing a central location to truly view all your media. Today’s Portable Players are complex media devices that not only store music and videos, but also photos and those are just two more of the great things users can look forward to in this release.

Lets look a little closer at the different components and within their locations:

Play tab – a combination of ‘Now Playing’ (which exist now only as a mini playing mode – discussed later) with Playlist wrapped into one. Its quite convenient and provides the option of easily navigating back and forth between your custom playlist while also viewing your main library of music. I wish there was a separator to make it easier to identify different albums from the artiste, also, I would have liked to see an option for one song within that active playlist to have the option of Repeat when selected though, instead playing over the entire playlist or having the user manually choose to play over that particular song by double clicking.

Burn tab – provides the same functionality as previous versions without the need to leave your music library. Some nice options are available such as Eject Disc After Burning, Apply Volume Leveling Across Tracks on Audio CDs and Name Disk (not checked by default).

Sync tab – provides synchronization capabilities for your portable player. I was not able to accurately test this since I do not own a MP3 player at this time, but similar options available in prior versions are just the same in this release.

The new mini playing mode, also works for video clips and movies.

If you find activated Tabs distracting, you can easily hide them by clicking the Tab once which will show the entire library. Organization of music in Media Player 12 has been greatly enhanced and the new layout of songs in the library provides a more simplified, yet detailed approach to interacting with your collections. I do find it frustrating that certain areas still cannot be customized, for instance, the Album art column cannot be unchecked, I would like to use that space for another column such as Date Added or Play Count.

One of the nice things I like about playing songs from my personal ripped collection of albums, when I hover the mouse pointer over the Album art in the ‘Play’ tab, it does not display buy. I found that annoying in Media Player 11, I already have the album on my hard disk, why is it suggesting that I purchase the album, a more neutral ‘shop’ link is displayed which could suggest buying more music from that artiste. You can also preview tracks in your library. You might ask, how different is this from simply double clicking a track and listening to it for a few seconds. When you hover a track and click the preview song link on the floating balloon, you will hear the song for approximately 15 seconds, the sweet part is, when you have heard enough, you simply move the pointer away from the floating balloon which will stop playing the song. The Windows Media Player Team could have made it even more innovative by simply hovering over the preview button without any manual clicking.

Windows Media Player becomes a true media player, you can also play slideshows.

Working with Management

Options once available under hidden drop down menus for each button of the player interface in Media Player 11 (Now Playing, Library etc) are now clearly exposed through Organize, Share and New Playlist.

Organize – Features menus for managing your library content, whether its Pictures, videos or Recorded TV. You can customize and arrange your library views by checking or un-checking columns in addition to customizing the Navigation Pane displaying drop down menus and access entire options for Media Player 12.

Stream

A new Stream Menu provides quick access to sharing your media and configuring options for how you can access it from other PC’s, some of the new options include:

• Set up your home PC so you can access your media libraries while away from home
• Allow other Windows 7 PCs and devices to push media to your Player and control it
• Quickly authorize all home PCs and devices to access your media collection

‘Play To’ allows playing media to be streamed from other shared media libraries within Windows Media Player, Windows 7 can now send media to be played on other Windows 7 PCs and DLNA-certified digital media renderers. With Play To,” you can browse or search from within Windows Media Player or Windows Explorer to find your desired media, and then choose where you want it to be played.

A versatile remote control window is presented for each Play To” session, providing you with the ability to control the entire experience. Play To” is available for both local media libraries and for shared media libraries. If you would like to send media from one Windows 7 PC to another, choose Allow remote control of my Player” from the Windows Media Player Stream” menu on the receiving PC. This will cause Windows Media Player to be discovered in the Play To” menu of other Windows 7 PCs on the same network.

Create Playlist – has its own dedicated menu which allows you to quickly create new custom playlist of your favorite content. There is also a sub menu for a New Auto Playlist which is a playlist that changes automatically according to criteria you have specified.

Performance and Quality

Media Player 12 is faster based on my testing, songs instantly play when double clicked in the library. To reduce the waiting time to launch full media player when you might only want to play an album or a few songs, there is a Mini Player mode called Now Playing Mode. This convenient setup instantly opens when you launch a song from an Explorer for instance (by default), immediately your music begins playing, no waiting, no hitching and no glitches. Media Players familiar Now Playing tools are situated here with visualization effects (that I think needs to be updated) and album art in the visualization similar to ‘mediaviz’ that was released for Media Player 10. Its quite nice and makes it more fun playing songs from a folder when you are not particularly interested with working the full media player library. The Mini-Player itself is resizable and intelligent in doing so, it knows when to show certain player controls and reveals more when it resized to a larger size. If you want to go back to the full Media Player, simply click the ‘Library Mode’ button on the player controls. I would have liked to see an option to hide the window border though, to give it a floating appearance. I still would like the option of turning it off and go directly to full library whenever a song is double clicked from Explorer although you can easily switch Library mode from the player controls, it’s just the extra step I would like to get out of the way.

Quality is very good, audio comes back pumping and clear to the listeners ears. This is something I have noticed since version 11, but I think it has more to do with the improvements to Audio in Windows 7/Vista. Since audio sounds puny when played in Windows XP I get a much richer experience on both Vista and 7. I imported 5.4 GBs of music (which is significantly small compared to some libraries), but there were no problems doing so and all my tracks were recognized along with album art. What I notice about miscellaneous tracks in a folder that the meta data such as song information and album art in particular needs to be downloaded again regardless its there hidden. There is also a mis-match of album art for different songs and artiste – kinda funny seeing Bill Haley’s Jingle Bell Rock represented by Shanice Wilson’s Greatest Hits.

You can enjoy your videos and movies in a number of cool ways from full screen to mini.

Watching Video

Watching movies is a favorite activity in Windows Media Player. Version 12 adds some improvements such as automatically going into full screen mode when you insert a DVD. There is also support for the new Mini-mode which looks lovely. From a technical point of view, Media Player 12 supports new video codec’s which were once available through Third party vendors, some include: MPEG-4, 3GPP standards, H.264 video, DivX and xVid. This of course delivers a richer playback experience for the consumer, which results in less disappointment, something which was true of Media Player 11. Often you would download some particular video just find out the correct codec is not installed to view it.

Changes and some missing options:

• Cannot play movies in the Library interface of Media Player 12.
• I cannot find a way to get Media Player 12 to open up in full screen mode when I play a media file, it always starts up in preview mode first – I still love preview mode though.
• Advanced Tag Editor isn’t included in Media Player. Microsoft says editing media information in the details pane of the Player Library allows you perform some of the tasks once available in Advanced Tag Editor.

Overall, Windows Media Player 12 looks like a solid release that will surely keep loyal users happy. Its fast, great design and user interface make it great application that I will continue to turn to for my media. The ability to now work with photos in addition to video is just a great way of defining WMP 12 as a true media player.

Playing with Windows Media Player 12 is a post by Andre from Notebooks.com.