Fujitsu P1620
Back in April 2008 I bought a new laptop to replace my Sony Vaio (which sounds like a jet due to the CPU fan failing). The costs of repair for the Sony are crazy, so I’ll use it as a ham radio computer until it dies and then flog off the RAM and hard drive.
After much consideration I ended up with the Fujitsu P1620 notebook/tablet. It has a screen that rotates and lies flat so it can be a notebook or a tablet. Very versatile! All the mod-cons are included except an optical drive, but I have a DVD multiformat burner in a USB2 box all ready, so that isn’t a drama. The Toshiba Portege R500 was a consideration (it has a DVD burner, but not the touchscreen), but the extra price and really flimsy keyboard put me off. The Sony Vaio TZ series was also an option, but was more expensive and had a cruddy warranty (Sony standard). All of the laptops considered use the Intel U7600 ultra low voltage dual core CPU running at 1.2GHz.
The P1620 is incredible portable. With the standard 3 cell battery it weighs 999g (according to my kitchen scales), and a bit more with the 6 cell battery. The long-life battery means that I don’t need to carry the AC adapter with it.
This is how the laptop looks. Click on the thumbnail to open the full sized photo in the gallery.
There are plenty of ports:
Left Side (PCcard slot):
Rear (VGA, modem, gigabit ethernet and Kensington lock):
Right Side (SD/SDHC reader, USB2, headphone, microphone, USB2):
Having an SDHC reader built into the card means that extra storage is easy. The built in HDD is ‘only’ 100GB (a quiet 1.8″ rotating HDD), but 16GB SDHC cards are not too expensive and it will only be a matter of time before the 32GB cards become reasonably priced.
Windows Vista Business is supplied on the laptop from the shop, but XP Tablet and Vista recovery discs are supplied. I trialled a Fujitsu P1610 to see how it all worked before buying the P1620 and I have to say that I think Vista is a better OS for a tablet PC than XP. With 2GB of RAM Vista performs quite well. The screen rotates to portrait automatically when the screen is flipped over, but there is manual rotation as well. Handwriting recognition works very well, and that’s without ‘training’ the software as that’s 45min of my life I wouldn’t get back.
With a smallish HDD and the large percentage of it that Vista takes (quite a porky OS) I’ve kept the laptop lean and clean with apps. Almost no duplication exists (one email client, one office suite, one photo editor etc) and it is all open source or freely available software. Linux might work on it, but I can’t see the reason in trying (since the OS came with it anyway), but such as large amount of Open Source software is available for Windows now it makes life easy. Doing presentations with OpenOffice Impress is worth it just for the confused looks in the audience 
.
If you’re in the market for a small, light, yet very capable laptop the P1620 should be considered. Don’t just take my word for it, as there are some really good reviews out there:
