Lenovo packs screen-tuning tools

LENOVO SAID today it will ship a new version of the LanDesk Management Suite that feeds into the firm's ThinkVantage Technologies to take care of networked ThinkPad notebooks and ThinkCentre desktops.

The latest ThinkVantage Technologies are supported by LandDesk Management Suite Version 8.7 that includes client security, systems update and other tools that let users do some of their own tweaks and let admins remotely distribute upgrades, troubleshoot and maintain consistent images -- of systems, that is, not the wispy-beards-and-vendor-logo-polo-shirts kind beloved of datacenters everywhere.

Perhaps more interestingly, Lenovo will from December have support for Entech Taiwan's OnScreen Manager that lets monitors be configured, rotated and tuned to individual specs.

Of course, any PC vendor with aspirations to sell to big business has its own brand of admin tools but it's questionable just how many of these get used in anger. Large firms will have already plunked down a sizeable sum for an IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView or CA Unicenter to wrap tentacles over the entire network, as well as an Altiris, LanDesk or similar for desktop deployments.

And with Intel taking a proprietary route with the *Ts, most notably with AMT and virtualisation, it's questionable just how valuable some of these vendor-specific pushes will be. Now that even Dell is taking the AMD powders, for instance, even a single vendor PC network begins to look at tad blurry from the perspective of these supposed crow's nests. µ