Do you want a laptop that inspires WOW?
Written: Dec 28 '01
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Pros: Beautiful, eye-catching, speed-demon, incredible features, great value
Cons: Big, on the heavy side, shiny case can scratch and lose sparkle
The Bottom Line: If like me, you have spent over half a year reading reviews after reviews on CNet, ZDNet and Epinions, let this be the last review you read!
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| anata's Full Review: Fujitsu LIFEBOOK C6557 (FPC040393) PC Notebook |
This is a freaking gorgeous, lovely, sweet, warm, intelligent, and just awesome laptop. It's blue and silver, has an incredible WOW-factor, and it sparkles! It's twenty times faster and a million times better than my old desktop because it has a 1Ghz Pentium processor, 30GB of hard drive, 256MB of RAM and a 8x DVD / 8x8x24 CD-RW drive that burns data CDs in 10 minutes flat. My boyfriend is a little bit jealous of my laptop because he knows that it absolutely delights me and sometimes I give it more attention than him. He also thinks that I should give it a name, but who gives their computers names? Only geeks, of course! And I'm no geek. I just act like one.
I have been eyeing Fujitsu Lifebook laptops for a long time, as evident by the other review I wrote (http://www.eopinions.com/content_28683439748). But since I hadn't seen one physically, I was a little skeptical as to whether or not they'd really look as good as the pictures on Fujitsu's website (www.fujitsupc.com). Also, I needed to test out the keyboard and feel how the laptop would sit in my dorm room or in my lap during lectures. So when I saw that Best Buy carries the C-series model in their stores, I immediately went over with my mom to check it out.
The first time I met eye-to-eye with the C-series notebook, I was totally astounded. Among a sea of dark gray and black laptops by Compaq, Sony, Toshiba, HQ and other ho-hum common-place manufacturers, the Fujitsu Lifebook shimmered even under the fluorescent store light. The lid is blueish silver with a tastefully designed Fujitsu logo, and most of the body is the same color. The laptop has an whitish silver accent in the front where a small strip of LCD strip, four small application launch buttons and two large stereo laptop speakers sit. My mom saw it, compared it to the other laptops at Best Buy, and said, "This one looks nice. We should get it!"
So we bought the laptop from an online store called Global Computers (www.laptopinc.com) that delivered the laptop to my dorm free of tax and shipping along with a 128MB RAM free upgrade. At the time I purchased the laptop, most manufacturers already were shipping Pentium 1Ghz laptops, but the exact same configuration from the ever-popular Dell corporation would have costed me nearly $1,000 more. Imagine that! I've also seen a lot of Dell 8000 and 4000 series laptops, and in my opinion they are just not worth the price and effort. Like I said in another review of Fujitsu laptops, my boyfriend used to work for Dell tech support, and they often use the cheapest parts possible. Now one look at the Fujitsu C-series tells me that someone poured an incredible amount of time, care, passion and love into designing and putting together this laptop.
How shall I begin to describe this masterpiece? The large, bright and gorgeous 14.1 inch screen fits 1024x768 resolution that is crisp and readable. There were no dead pixels in any of the laptops I saw, and I've been to three Best Buys, two in Ohio and one in Florida. Of course, there are also no dead pixels in the one sitting on my desk right now. The main keys on the keyboard are all full-sized, and typing is very comfortable. I've churned out 4,000 or 5,000 words in 1.5 hour lectures. Like a real keyboard, there is a large backspace key, the arrow keys form an inverted T, and a good-sized right shift key.
The touchpad is sensitive and responsive. The Fujitsu drivers for the touchpad allow you to set acceleration speed, tapping, side scrolling, orientation and more. You can even set it to not respond while you're typing, an extremely useful option if you've ever run into the problem of your palm moving the mouse cursor while typing. The buttons for the touchpad are silver and easy to press, and they make a nice "click" sound. There is also an extremely useful scroll button between the left and right touchpad buttons. At the front of the laptop, there is an application panel that can only be described as delicious eye-candy. It can be used to launch four of your favorite programs, play a CD while the lid is down, and a small glowing green light indicates when you have received new email. You can also check the status of the laptop's battery (which in my informal tests last 3 and half hours of intensive usage) on the LCD indicator. Another useful feature of the indicator is to see whether or not your hard drive is busy. Yes, the hard drive of this laptop is that quiet.
Did I mention that this laptop costed me less than two thousand bucks? Recently I checked the prices again at Global Computers, and it costs around $1300 or $1200. There is also a new model that has a 15.1 inch screen if you want a bigger, badder viewing experience.
The C-series comes with a plethora of connectivity options. 56K modem and NIC ethernet? Yes. Infared port? Yes. Parallel (printer) port? Yes. IEEE 1394 Firewire port? Included. A whopping four USB ports? Of course. S-video out so you can watch DVDs on a real TV screen? Definitely. Now how many laptops do you know has all that? The laptop has a Yahama multi-channel 64-voice wavetable synthesizer sound card, which means that you can listen to MP3's and hear ICQ's annoying sound events at the same time. As mentioned earlier, there are stereo speakers located in front of the laptop. They sound merely decent for everyday purposes, but there are audio connections like headphone and microphone jacks, stereo line in, and optical digital audio (SPDIF) output if you're into heavy-bass music or need higher sound quality. There is also a great volume control dial on the right side of the laptop that works independently of any software, so I can mute my laptop during a lecture with the touch of my little finger. The standard Kingston security lock hole is located on the left side of the laptop. There is also a handy on/off button on the side in addition to another silver reset button above the keyboard. The on/off button means that you can be sure all power sources are turned off, and it's also great for those times when Windows screws up.
Speaking of Windows, you can customize your machine to come pre-installed with Windows 98 Second Edition, Windows 2000, Windows ME or Windows XP. I prefer Win98SE because it's small and fast, plus it supports a lot of the video games I like to play. I play Counter-Strike and The Sims on this laptop with little or no discernible speed lag. My boyfriend's Civilization III also works beautifully. The ATI Rage video card has SDRAM embedded video RAM, which means that it does not depend on system memory to process video and graphics. Nerds, video gamers and graphic nuts can rejoice!
The overall speed of the system is simply out of this world. I do intensive web design and web development. Programs like PSP and Photoshop loads in a snap, filters finish in a second, and the university's T1 connection pumps files at sometimes 1.6mb/s onto the huge 30GB hard drive. The hard drive, by the way, is made in Japan by Toshiba. I'm not sure what the RPM (rotations per minute) is, but the hard drive definitely runs fast. The 256MB of RAM does wonders for the system as well. I multitask between many different programs and have not once seen the out-of-memory error.
The downside of all of these features is that the laptop is a bit heavy. It weighs approximately 7 pounds according to Fujitsu's website. My daily walk to classes take around 20 to 30 minutes, and carrying this laptop in my backpack is a definite pain. The integrated floppy disk drive cannot be removed, nor can the DVD / CDR / CDRW combination drive. If you are looking for the option of swapping out the optical drive for a second battery or a weight-saver, try the lighter Fujitsu E-series.
Now here are some more technical stuff. The BIOS is easy to navigate and has a lot of options. You can set a power-on password, a password for changing the BIOS, or a password for return from standby mode. I have not had problems with hang-ups with return from standby mode like a lot of other laptop users have complained. I don't use the hibernate feature since standby seems to conserve power nicely and is faster. There are two PC card slots that allow for two type II cards or one Type III card. In other words, you can get a wireless ethernet card and stick it in the laptop.
The system bus speed is 100mhz, but the E-series laptops have a 133mhz bus. The difference is not significant to me, but for the business user this might be something else to consider.
For those who have read thus far, allow me to recommend this system to you. Whether you are a poor college student like me, a casual home user, a video game enthusiast, a lover of beautiful things or just looking for a laptop for whatever reason, the Fujitsu C-series is your dream machine. If you're a road-warrior and need a smaller, lighter machine, I recommend the Fujitsu P or S-series, which weigh less than 4 lbs and still come with CDRW/DVD combo drives. For all the rest of you, go out and get this sparkling, shimmering, silver and simply amazing laptop!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1799
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 14
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 21-30
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Epinions.com ID:
anata
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Location: Chicago, IL
Reviews written: 3
Trusted by: 4 members
About Me:
My name is Rose. Anata = A Not Available Teasing Asian
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