Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li 1718
After canceling my rock laptop order I decided to head down to Comet to secure myself a more ‘budget’ laptop.
I had a few minimum requirements,
- a Core2duo, not a celeron
- at least a gig of memory
- large hard disk
- Vista Home Premium (not basic)
- ~15 inch screen
- a ‘trustable’ brand*
* Trustable in my eyes, i.e. someone I had bought from previously that had proven to be of above-average build quality.
Out of the box
The laptop was packaged in a neat small box, barely bigger in width and height than the laptop itself and about 5x as deep. Packaging was sturdy and compartmentalised, I am sure it would easily survive shipping but as I bought it on the high street that wasn’t an issue.
I note that I am writing this a month after purchase so forgive my memory, but off the top of my head the box contained the laptop, charger, rescue disks and a few manuals (which I haven’t opened).
The beast within
- Intel Core2Duo 5700
- ATI radeon on-board gfx (mobility)
- 1 gig DDR2 memory
- 160gig hard disk
The machine itself had various protective plastic coverings which were easily removed with no residual glue or marking and first impressions are of a lovely little package. Mine has a silver backed lid with the manufacturers logo embedded and is otherwise all black.
The lid opens with comfortable and solid resistance and proves the machine to be superbly balanced. There are 4 embedded buttons at the top right of the keyboard and from left tor right they are, wifi, browser hotkey, fanless mode (quiet mode) and power. An array of 7 LEDs provides feedback at the bottom left of the base and give, wifi, power, sleep, hdd, charging, caps and num locks.
It has a glossy type screen, which is the first time I have owned one. With a soft press of the power button the machine comes to life. A quick POST screen later, windows erupts into life, the boot is a quick one and once you have setup Vista it is clear that the little laptop is more than capable of delivering the Aero experience along with running multiple applications with little difficulty.
Build Quality
To be honest I didn’t have big expectations from a ‘budget’ laptop but I have to say this machine is solid, all the ports are tucked away nicely and the plastic feels thick and sturdy.
Even putting it through it’s paces there is no tactile heat build up and the fan (which vents through slats on the left of the base) works away quite quietly, the ample rubber feet on the bottom provide good clearance on a flat surface so the whole unit is properly cooled. It really does feel like no corners were cut in the design process.
Usability and Performance
The keyboard!… the subject of which was so important and such a let down in my review of the Rock Pegasus 670. Thankfully the keyboard on the Amilo provides good feedback and is responsive, I type fairly quickly and sometimes not as firmly as I should but have had no problems at all.
The laptop is not a light beast but it’s also not really that heavy, i had no problems lugging it around airports in my Pakuma rucksack. I would imagine it’s exactly what you would expect from a laptop of it’s class in terms of weight.
From a functionality point of view I would say that it needs an extra gig of ram to be really effective with Windows Vista, however it is perfectly usable without, until you start messing with big images or more than 4 or 5 concurrent apps. The CPU on the other hand just laps it up.
Conclusions
I paid £380 for the Amilo and it is more than worth it for those that do not want to play games. I put in a lot of research into low end laptops and in my opinion this is top of the pile, boasting a Core2Duo processor and a large hard disk.
A lot of people tend to head direct to Dell when they have similar needs to mine, and whilst I also feel they have fine machines, I still couldn’t find something of similar specification and quality from them.
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