Lenovo has announced that certain models of their Think and Idea PCs will get a special treatment for Windows 7, known as the Lenovo Enhanced Experience.

This announcement centers around specific improvements made to the Windows 7 preloads that will be available on select Lenovo PCs. Let’s dispense with the facts, courtesy ComputerWorld:

Fixed the drivers of on-board hardware components that were cumulatively causing massive delays. For instance, Lenovo discovered a driver for a “popular wireless device” had been written to pass worst-condition certification specs and thus would grab 4 MB of continuous memory from the system in 4 KB chunks, said Locker. That added five seconds to the time it took for a PC to go to sleep. After getting the third-party vendor to fix the driver, Lenovo cut the driver’s overhead to just 200 milliseconds, Locker said.

Tweaked the BIOS phase of startup to temporarily hide some devices from Windows 7, so that the OS only loads the drivers after the boot is finished.

Tweaked Windows 7 to delay the loading of non-essential services and applications until after startup. Those include automatic-updating apps for Adobe and Microsoft, or even Windows features. While users can try to fiddle with Windows themselves, Locker warns that do-it-yourselfers likely won’t achieve the same improvements.

Rewrote its power manager to be easier to use. It also includes an extra chip in its notebooks to more precisely measure the remaining battery life than Windows 7’s, and help you “stretch” it out as long as possible.

What does all this supposedly get you? Think PCs will boot up to 56% faster, while Idea PCs get a 33% boost. This is the result of three years of work by Lenovo’s “Velocity” team in collaboration with Microsoft, where they timed the load performance of every driver and application to identify the bottlenecks.

Matt Kohut over at Inside the Box (Welcome back Matt! We’ve missed you in the blogoshere) shares some relative benchmarks on system boot times with the various operating systems. He also shares some tips on decreasing boot times with BIOS tweaks, which I suggest you take a gander at.

This is indeed a healthy decrease in boot time, but I have to agree with some of the commenters about Matt suggesting that reboots can be faster than hibernating: a reboot means I have to load all my apps up again to be productive. With Hibernate or Standby, I’m ready to go once everything loads back up and everything is as I have left it.

This sounds great and is indeed a great marketing point for Lenovo, but not necessarily entirely unique, nor entirely due to Lenovo’s work. As much as I love Lenovo engineering, they aren’t the only ones to do stuff like this and you can count on HP and Dell to have analyzed their preloads for any major bottlenecks. Also, they cite that Lenovo Enhanced Experience PCs will boot X% faster than Windows XP or Vista on the same machine. Of course it will boot 33% or 56% faster than XP or Vista (count on that number being based on Vista), as Windows 7 is a faster and much better optimized operating system. Let’s also not forget that Lenovo has always included a separate power management hardware chip, it’s just not something that is heavily publicized. (It helps that I’ve written plenty of those marketing messages and can sniff them out pretty easily)

While I pick on Lenovo’s overly optimistic marketing message, the effort behind the work is highly laudable. PC manufacturers need to differentiate more than ever, not to mention that one of the industry’s biggest challenges (outside of the down economy) is Windows itself. I look forward to sampling the Enhanced Experience once everything is final!

Sources: [ComputerWorld] & [Inside the Box]