Fujitsu Lifebook E8410 Review

Fujitsu Lifebook E8410

Published August 25, 2008 at 01:16:13 PM, by Travis Simon

Design & Features

Overview
Today were taking a look at the Fujitsu Lifebook E8410 15.4 widescreen notebook through the Laptop Logic Labs this black metallic beauty has the new 45nm Intel chipset inside, and even though our particular model doesnt boast the NVIDIA GeForce 8400M G with 128 MB of dedicated memory (opting rather for the integrated x3100 Intel GMA) it does come featured with Bluetooth and Wireless N inside, along with some old school Parallel and Serial ports!

Design

Case look and feel

Upon removing the Lifebook E8410 out of its box, you will notice the very attractive, all aluminum LCD cover. Im used to seeing plastic or some other sort of weird composite for an LCD lid, making this a welcome change. The aluminum face is met by beefy LCD hinges at the rear almost 2 in width on either side. These give the E8410 a very robust feel not cheap at all. The brushed (or burned?) aluminum call sign of Fujitsu Lifebook graces the middle. Towards the top end of the LCD lid is a glossy black plastic. Im assuming this houses the wireless antennae location, as the aluminum might offer a decent amount of resistance to the signal.

The bottom of the chassis is also nearly all aluminum. Again not a bad thing, and certain areas of the chassis are covered in a felt like material, that also aides in the unit not slipping and sliding around.

There is also a dedicated docking slot that accepts a proprietary accessory dock.

Keyboard

Open the LCD lid and you are greeted with a slight off-white full keyboard, surrounded by speakers on either side of a silver plastic bezel trim. It is noted that this keyboard is spill resistant; at least it says so in the user manual - I didnt test it out. The base of the chassis did offer a little more flex than I was expecting Im assuming because of the hot-swap bay. The speakers, although given ample space on either side, are very tinny sounding normal I suppose, but I was expecting fuller sound, and was left very unimpressed (unfortunately).

The keyboard feels ok (yes, just ok, not the best, not the worst), typing distance is relatively smooth, but the layout isnt the most user friendly. The page up / page down are functioned together with home and end, and the delete key is in kind of a funky position. The touchpad is decently sized and offered great response after some tweaking it is surrounded by 2 sets of left/right click buttons.

You will also find the biometric fingerprint scanner below the touchpad, in between the lower set of mouse buttons. It worked well, and can be used to store passwords instead of typing them for entry.

On the upper portion of the keyboard area is a small LCD which offers battery status, wireless power state, HDD activity, cap, num and scroll lock, etc. Unfortunately, this area does not illuminate, making it near impossible to read in the dark. I really wish you could illuminate this, or have the option to at least. A simple LED wouldnt hurt, would it Fujitsu? Then again, there are no busy blaring hyper-LEDs scattering your normal vision, which is also welcomed.

To right hand upper portion, there is a set of four hot buttons 1-4 (and enter) that can be programmed as shortcut keys. But they also serve another function one that follows the Lifebook blood hard and true. These buttons can act as a 5 digit pass code before the computer can boot up. Highly effective in thwarting thieves! You can enter this information through a program in Windows Vista to engage when you first boot the laptop up. As default hot buttons, the 1 key launches Notepad, 2 is the calculator, 3 is Internet Explorer (or your default browser) and 5 launches your email application.

Connectivity
The E8410 houses a plentiful array of connections, even going old school with some Parallel and Serial port connections. Some might find the multi-pinned ports of yore archaic, but to others in the business world where they dont have the investments of newer equipment, this is a god send. Im torn between the two points of interest, seeing no point for myself, but know of many professionals that still faithfully use a serial port to upload maps to their GPS. And yes, some still rely on good old parallel ports to connect to a printer. Anyways, lets leave the judgment up to you and just showcase them.

Front

The front of the E8410 contains the wireless LAN on/off switch, IR port, media card reader, and hinge release. Nothing too fancy however, I have to note that the media reader did NOT work for me. I tried 2 different brands and sizes (2GB and 1GB) and neither registered. This is not a SDHC capable reader that Im aware of, but even so, it wouldnt register my media and there were no problems stating from the control panel / hardware settings. Other than that, Im glad to see there isnt an optical drive here! Making sure that if you DO use an alternative notebook riser (like the Logitech Alto I reviewed previously) it doesnt interfere with normal usage too much. Plus one, Fujitsu! Toshiba, take notice!

Left

Power jack, Audio out, Mic in, RJ-45, two USB 2.0 ports, four-pin Firewire, CPU exhaust and heres the real winner a PC Card AND ExpressCard AND Smart Card reader built-in!

Still got that old PCMCIA TV tuner card, but want 5.1 ExpressCard surround sound AND secure shopping with your Smart Card? You can do it! Hooray!

Right

Not to much shaking on the right side we have a lock slot, DVD-RW removable driveand thats it.

Rear

Normally, the rear of laptops arent too impressive yet with the E8410 we yet ANOTHER lock slot, exhaust location, two more USB 2.0 ports, a parallel port, serial port, VGA out, Ethernet and S-video out. Honestly, I would use 90% of those, maybe 100% if I dug out some cool old-school joysticksbut again, the use of the parallel and serial connections is strictly user preference. If it were up to me, I would ditch the PA and SA connections for DVI or HDMI especially the unit that houses the dedicated NVIDIA 8400 card.

Display
The display on this unit has a 1280x800 WXGA panel driven by Intel's GMA X3100 integrated graphics card featuring 358MB video RAM (128 dedicated, 230 shared). The display was evenly lit, and offered decent, flicker free output on the glossy LCD. However, the viewing angles left something to be desired. But then again, considering this is a business laptop its maybe a blessing in disguise. If on a plane, I wouldnt want to have all my fancy information or movie shared with the next personso it might pan out well.

Straight on, a wonderful Ms. Nat.

The bottom and top angle not so great looking Ms. Nat.

The side angle isnt too bad however. Ive seen worse, and it depends on what is being displayed.

The vertical viewing angles were not impressive, but the side to side viewing angles were not TOO bad as noted in the pictures.

Size & Weight

The E8410 isnt the thinnest around, but by no means as huge as some weve reviewed. The actual dimensions come in at 14.1 in x 10.1 in x 1.4 inches. Not too bad, but definitely could lose some thickness; it is almost surprising to note that the thickness doesnt help with the body flex. The LCD lid is very sturdy and should hold up to many bumps and bruises.

As far as weight is concerned, loaded up with a 6-cell battery, it ticks in at just over 6 pounds.

The power adapter isnt enormous, shown here along with the battery compared to a DVD.

Upgrading
There isnt much more you can boast from this laptop, as both DIMM sockets are filled (in our configured model) with each containing 1GB of DDR2 667 RAM. The hard drive is a SATA 5400rpm 120 GB hard drive, formatted into two partitions. For the performance and price the best thing to do would be opt for the NVIDIA 8400 dedicated card option, and even though its only 128MB of dedicated RAM, Vista will love you for it.

Features

Weve mentioned most of the features at least in passing so far, and as you can probably tell, this laptop is rather loaded on the whole. Wireless connectivity is abundant, featuring 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth, and IR - options you usually only find on more media centric laptops.

It does carry a 1.3mp webcam on the upper portion of the LCD lid, which, if this is geared towards the business user provides ample power for decent video conferencing, but not much more. Simple snapshots looked decent, although the color seemed muted and unnatural sometimes (as most small sensor webcams often produce). It does not swivel, something that isnt a make or break deal, but I wish it was able to do so.

The other great feature to make this a worthy road-warrior is the option to hot swap your DVD drive out, and insert another (sold separately) battery.

Just a flick of your fore-finger and the drive will pop right out, making it a snap to either ditch the weight and save some battery power, or add a different drive / battery to gain.

Every laptop we review goes through a standard set of tests, although we do opt to skip some tests with units that do no have dedicated GPUs (as in this laptops case). The gaming section has been omitted from this test and all remaining results are gathered. You can read more about our testing methodology here. 

PCMark Vantage Pro

The PCMark tests were SPANKED by the efficient dual core Penryn CPU. It loves its duties thats for sure. It scored WAY above our Acer Ferrari, almost 500 points more!

3DMark 2006

Ugh, integrated graphics and Windows Vista are NEVER a good combination. Interesting to note that the F45 did do a lot better compared the Lifebook. However, this laptop is not geared at ALL for graphics or gaming, but on the road mobility workstation, which the following test provides a decent testament to that.

WorldBench

A great world bench score definitely loves to multi-task and do it efficiently. It is right up there with our Lenovo 3000.

Battery Performance

A great battery featured notebook for watching DVDs. It made it 4/5 of the way through the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King which was just over 2 and hours. Not to bad for a stock battery setup and volume at 50%!

Real-life usage
Using 50% brightness, volume, wireless on, and battery performance set to balanced, I got 3 hours and 42 minutes out of normal web browsing, typing, email, surfing, and listening to a few mp3 audio books here and there. Not bad at all. Imagine if you ditched the DVD drive and opted for yet another battery? One might argue they could work through a coast-to-coast flight, which is impressive by any laptops standards, especially in a 15.4 form factor.

The heat was minimal thanks to its efficient 45nm processor and well ventilated exhaust ports and the touchpad was great after a few customizations within Vista.

Conclusion

Pros:

• Penryn CPU
• Many connectivity options
• Great battery life
• Aesthetically pleasing

Cons:

• Thick & heavy, no exotic materials to reduce weight

Im torn between the simple aesthetics, yet ample connections and battery performance. This laptop is by no means the beefiest configured road warrior, nor the flashiest. However it offers a lot of amenities and very usable computing power under the hood, coupled with great heat management, excellent battery life, and different configurations that can be ordered to fit the bill with a dedicated graphics cardI have to say Im mighty impressed. Not to mention coming in at a base price under $1,600 for a top of the line Penryn CPU and excellent features, I have to put this right up there with the Highly Recommended. It only falls short of Editors Choice because of the keyboard layout/feel, not able to upgrade the RAM further, and the speakers could definitely use a revamp. For a business user, you have to take a look at this form factor as 15.4 is a little on the larger side to lug around however, carrying a nearly 4 hour battery span definitely evens the playing field.

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