Fujitsu LifeBook S7020D Review
Yesterday, I was able to give the S7020D a go from Fujitsu. It is a pretty lightweight machine, weighing around 4.3lbs with its six-cell main battery. One of the more important things for me in a laptop is the battery life, and while the LifeBook S7020Dhas a 14.1 inch screen, it does not have an amazing battery life, as it can only run for around three hours on the included battery. You can of course tweak some settings to get a full four hours of the machine, but who wants to set their screen that dark? It has also been said that it can almost make the seven hour mark with a larger nine-cell battery.
As many laptops are making almost four hours on six-cell batteries these days, this is a little disappointing, especially since it is such an expensive system. The store I went to had the machine retailing for $2179 Canadian ($1877 USD).
Some of the other features worth making note of were that the machine I tested came with a Intel Centrino processor running at 2.0GHz, 512MB DDR2 Ram, 60 GB SATA 5400RPM hard drive, dual layer DVD-burner, as well as built-in 802.11a/b/g wireless access.
The machine felt sturdy, and I did not feel the same kind of flexibility while lifting it and using it on my lap, that I have felt from other laptops. I found the keyboard a little small, and odd, but I am not totally used to notebook keyboards yet. The trackpad seemed rather decent, as I was able to move around the screen, and drag items without too much fuss.
Thankfully though, if you don’t like trackpads, there are three USB 2.0 ports, two in the back, and one on the right hand side, making adding a mouse pretty easy, and convenient.
One other major thing of note is that the Fujitsu LifeBook S7020D comes with integrated graphics, meaning that this machine, while as expensive as some more powerfully featured competition, will not be able to hold its own if you want to do any gaming, and also overall system performance is going to take a bit of a hit due to the card using some of your RAM for video memory, up to 128MB. The integrated graphics is powered by the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900, which was a long time standard, but it would have been nice to include something a little better for such a machine.
Don’t let the graphics capabilities get you too down though, as the screen was a pleasure to look at. I found very little reflection on the screen from my surroundings, colors looked crisp, and detailed, though I found the XGA (1,024 x 768) resolution a little low compared to what I have on my LCD monitor at home. The machine was able to play DVD’s just fine on the screen, while the DVD-rom did not make too much noise.
The heat coming off the machine was not too bad as laptops go, especially since the machine I tested had already been running for a few hours.
Overall I would give the Fujitsu LifeBook S7020D a three point five out of five (3.5/5). It has some good features, but seems almost one generation behind without the cheaper price.
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