| Article Index |
|---|
| Fujitsu LifeBook E8410 Notebook Review |
| Page 2 - Style and Design |
| Page 4 - Connectivity, Battery Life, Extras |
| Page 5 - Conclusion |
| All Pages |
Style and Design:
On the outside the LifeBook E8410 employs Fujitsu’s standard Dark grey with gloss black colour scheme which is very common across their range, but when you open it up you’re greeted with a mix of silver, black and white surfaces, which serve to give the E8410 a very professional look without looking too dull or boring, and as it’s clearly aimed at the more business orientated customers, this should work quite well in that market.
There are no other colour options available for this series unlike many others in the Fujitsu range, so if you want this notebook, this is the only colour scheme you have available.
They layout of the keyboard and cursor touchpad is very conventional but is comfortable to use and works quite well, and while there is no scroll bar on the touchpad, the fingerprint sensor acts as a scroll wheel within Windows. Personally I’d prefer a scroll bar on the touchpad as the fingerprint sensor is never very precise and will often either move too fast or not move at all. An extra set of mouse buttons reside above the touchpad, these are there for when you use the little pointing stick (look it up, that’s what it’s called) in the middle of the keyboard, I really hate those things, but I know some (weird) people like them, and as this notebook seems to include everything under the sun, might as well have one of these as well.
Above the keyboard we have 4 configurable hotkey shortcuts and an LCD status panel which shows the activity and status of everything from the battery(s), AC Power, Hard Drive, WiFi and Flash Cards as well as the normal keyboard status lights for Num/Scroll/Caps Lock. This panel is unfortunately not backlit which makes it very hard to read at night, as a matter of fact there are no LEDs on this notebook at all, not even for the LAN port or the optical drive. Well actually the optical drive does have one, but it’s been hidden away, and is only slightly (probably unintentionally) visible between two edges of plastic, but there is no power LED, hard drive activity LED etc... Not one, which is really odd. All the activity is reported through the small LCD mentioned earlier, and with the lid closed, you wouldn’t even know if this notebook was turned on unless you felt warm air coming out the side. A very strange design concept and I must say one that I’m not a fan of.
Around the top of the LCD screen there is the in-built webcam and microphones, which are nicely blended in to their surroundings, a kind of ‘stealth’ inclusion if you will. The camera performs well for basic video conferencing and capture, but the software included is nothing special, and can capture simple photos and videos only, no special effects like you’d find on something like a MAC iSight camera, although not essential it’s nice to have and play around with when you’re bored, or for your kids.
Standing out a little bit more than the camera is the stereo speakers on each side of the keyboard, which although being no bigger than any other notebook speaker system I’ve encountered, can produce very loud sound at excellent quality, some of the best I’ve ever heard from standard notebook speakers. Of course HD Audio processing is included as with just about all current notebooks, but it’s good to know they matched it with good quality speakers to give a good overall sound package.
{mospagebreak title=Page 3 - CPU, Memory, Screen}
CPU, Memory, Screen:
Powering the LifeBook E8410 we have here is an Intel Core 2 Duo T7500 CPU which runs at 2.2Ghz, and even though we’re running Vista which rips the guts out of even the most promising performance machines, it actually performs very impressively. Working along with the 2GB of DDR2 667Mhz RAM, the E8410 obtains a PCMark05 score of 4531, and compared to the T7200 CPU based LifeBook S6311 we tested a couple of months ago which only scored 3355, the E8410 performs brilliantly.
One of the great points about this notebook is the inclusion of a proper graphics card, the GeForce 8400M from nVidia. The GeForce 8400M comes with 128MB of dedicated video memory and can make use of another 256MB of system RAM, giving it a total of 384MB of usable video memory. We checked its performance under 3DMark06 and it returned a result of 916 3DMarks, which although not great compared to desktop cards, is brilliant for notebook graphics, and being a GeForce 8x series chipset, will even be able to run DirectX10 games and applications.
With the amount of video ram available the E8410 is able to play full screen and windowed video on both the notebook screen and an external monitor or projector, something that lesser graphics systems in many notebooks are unable to do and is a very useful feature, especially for business customers, or home users wanting to play content on a home theatre setup.
Speaking of the notebook screen, it’s a 15.4” widescreen WSXGA screen that displays a standard resolution of 1680 x 1050, and thankfully does NOT have one of those shiny and very reflective covers over the top of it like so many others on the market, instead it has the usual matt type of plastic finish over the top of the screen yet still remains very bright with a very sharp picture. A strange thing I noticed, that may only be an issue with this demo model, I can’t tell, is that when I tried to adjust the brightness, both within windows and through the function keys on the laptop, the brightness never changed at all, it told me it was changing it through the on-screen display, but nothing happened. Hopefully this is just an issue with my demo model, a strange problem to have though.
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|137.132.250.xxx |2008-01-30 11:02:15 LIM YAN CHONG - Solved the screen problemI has faced the problem since I recovered my lifebook by using the recovery dvd. To solve the problem, go to the fujitsu website and download the latest video driver (instead of clearly states it as nvdia driver, fujitsu states it as video driver) under download & support.
