First impressions of P-2046
Written: May 12 '02 (Updated May 17 '02)
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Pros: Small size, light weight, CD Writer, good price
Cons: No backup CD for Win XP
The Bottom Line: The hardware is good. Compared with most subnotebooks, this one has lots of features at a good price.
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| murdoch's Full Review: Fujitsu LifeBook P-2046 Crusoe 800MHz / 20GB / 256... |
I got my Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046 about 4 days ago, and thought I'd give my first impressions of it.
Hardware
My previous notebook was a Libretto 70, so I was looking for a very small machine. The P-2046 isn't as small as the Libretto, but it's very nice. It comes with a removable CD-RW/DVD drive; that's a very nice addition. The floppy drive is external, using USB.
There's a nice collection of connectors on this laptop: power, phone (for the built-in modem), 100BaseT Ethernet, two USB ports, S-video, headphones and microphone, a mini-VGA port (with included dongle), Firewire. There's one PCMCIA slot. I haven't tried most of them: only the power, Ethernet and USB so far. All have been fine (with one note below). It also has built-in wireless.
The standard battery seems to last about 1-2 hours; I've ordered the drive bay battery, but the supplier didn't have any in stock so I don't have it yet.
As it arrived, this laptop is not really upgradable. I can see feeling limited by the 256Meg of RAM before I retire it, but that's my only worry. I haven't checked that the 20GIG disk is replaceable; I'll probably find out in a couple of years.
This laptop is very quiet. When the hard drive is running you need to look at the indicator on the little LCD panel below the screen to see that anything is happening; you can just barely hear it when the heads make a big move. There's no fan. It runs kind of warm (not uncomfortably warm, but noticeably); I don't know if that will be a problem in the summer.
The screen is very sharp and clear, with brightness controls available on the keyboard (Fn F6 and Fn F7 to dim it or brighten it).
After using the Libretto, I find the keyboard luxuriously large. I think most people would not have a problem with it. The layout is kind of weird; the Insert and Delete keys in particular are stupidly placed way up at the top right.
The QuickPoint mouse (pencil eraser type between the G and H keys) works okay; I like the Libretto's positioning it up on the side of the screen better, because I find it a lot more natural to move the cursor with my thumb and click with the two fingers; the Lifebook's positioning is tiring. I can feel my carpal tunnel closing :-). I suppose I'll get used to it.
The one hardware problem I had was caused by a BIOS powersaving option: if you turn on the laptop on battery power and it doesn't detect a signal on the network, it disables the network card. As far as I can tell, it's not possible to re-enable it without shutting down and starting over. This caused me a bit of wasted time until I found it described in the manual. There's a BIOS option to leave it always on; I haven't decided whether to use that or not yet.
Software
The laptop comes with WinXP Pro, and a few utilities, but no office suite or anything like that. This suits me fine; I have my own preferences for software, and don't want to pay for something I won't use.
The software for the CD R-W drive is real crap; I'll have to throw it out soon. It's poorly documented, it's ugly, it doesn't give enough options.
There's also a "Fujitsu Service Assistant" program that's fairly nice. It organizes a bunch of FAQs, and it also gives the option of sending a message to tech support. I submitted a question and got a complete and accurate response 3 hours later -- all of this on a Saturday night.
By far the worst part of the software is WinXP Pro. I mainly use Win9x, and have used NT4. I don't like most of the new things that XP gives me. It comes with the usual newer and uglier user interface that we'd expect from Microsoft (but it is possible after a lot of work to install a "classic" look). It does some nice things (like allowing multiple users to be signed on at once, with relatively quick switching between them).
The most irritating part of it is partly a hardware problem: there is no CD supplied with the OS. You get it on the disk; if you screw up and hose your disk, you're out of luck. My question to Fujitsu was about this; they said they'll charge $150 to re-install the OS in a case like this. The tech advice was to upgrade the "Drive Image SE" software (from the people who make Partition Magic). The version that ships with the machine is severely crippled:
it only allows you to do a drive image backup to another partition on the same disk. The commercial version (a $US40 upgrade) can do the backup to CD. This version should have been bundled with the laptop.
The other problem with WinXP is just that it is different, and doesn't work with old programs properly. For example, I use TextPad to edit text files, but it's very hard to associate text files to it: unless running as the Administrator, the Notepad association is really hard to get rid of.
UPDATE:
Just found another disadvantage to not getting the WinXP CD. There appears to be no way to install NetBEUI networking. There are instructions on the web to do it from some extra software on the CD, but I don't have that.
I have a message in at tech support; I'll see how well they respond.
4 days later: No response at all. I guess my Saturday night quick answer was an aberration. However, the web site www.leog.net has a very helpful discussion board; I now have my NetBEUI driver installed.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 2000
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Other
Processor speed: 701-800
Screen Size: 11
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
murdoch
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