Lifebook S6410

While the Fujitsu LifeBook S6410H is nothing flash, it's a nicely designed notebook and has enough power to handle most common tasks with relative ease. Fujitsu has installed LED backlights for the screen on this notebook, a feature which offers a brighter, whiter image with a wider colour gamut. It is also more environmentally friendly as no Mercury is used in LEDs. Despite running on Windows Vista Business, the S6410 isn't strictly a business notebook, though business users will enjoy its lightweight (1.8kg w/out power supply) and portable nature as well as the simple but stylish black chassis.

The S6410H offers the benefits of Intel's latest Centrino Duo platform (Santa Rosa), including the new T7300 2.0GHz CPU with an 800MHz FSB, the new Intel X3100 graphics adaptor and Wi-Fi 802.11 a/g with draft-n. Draft-n offers a theoretical maximum of 300Mbps transfers, though we haven't seen speeds of this magnitude achieved yet. Our review unit offers 1GB of DDR2 RAM, which should be plenty. If you're after a slightly more powerful model, with a faster CPU or more RAM, Fujitsu also offers the S6410P model with 2GB of RAM and a T7500 2.2GHz CPU.

In our benchmarks the S6410H did well, scoring a total of 70 in WorldBench 6. Most of the latest Centrino Duo notebooks we've tested fall somewhere between 70 and 80, so the S6410H performs as expected, albeit at the lower end of the scale. Regardless, a score of 70 indicates it will handle most common applications comfortably.

In our MP3 encoding test, where we encode 53 minutes of WAV files to 192Kbps MP3 files the Fujitsu took 135 seconds; a result we expected from this CPU. Although the X3100 graphics chip is more powerful than its predecessor it's still not a gaming chip and its results reflected this. In 3DMark 2006 it achieved a mere 417 which is far to low for any newer 3-D games. A score of 4378 in 3DMark 2001 SE indicates that some older games might still work reasonably well, but don't count on this machine for gaming performance.

It did well in our battery test, lasting just short of two hours (115 minutes) in our DVD rundown test, which involves us looping a DVD on the notebook without a power source. This is a worst case test due to the extra drain caused by the optical drive and speakers and the system should last longer still under normal daily usage.

Overall the build quality is good. There's little flex in the chassis or the screen, despite the display being mounted in a fairly thin housing. The keyboard is comfortable to type on and the touchpad and buttons are responsive. Above the keyboard a set of dual function controls are accessible. In Application mode they are hotkeys for the Internet, Mail, Support (which links to a Fujitsu support Website) and one programmable key. To the right side of these buttons is a Mode button, which switches from Application to Player mode, which changes the function of the keys to media controls.

The S6410H offers a few extra features including a Webcam, a media card reader (xD, SD, MMC, MS/MS-Pro are supported) and a biometric fingerprint reader. The 13.3in display has a native resolution of 1280 x 800 and produces a fairly bright image with reasonable contrast. The viewing angle is about average for what we see in most notebooks. The speakers mounted into the main body of the chassis above the keyboard suffice for basic needs but hardly produce an immersive sound. A 100GB hard drive is installed and so is a DVD re-writer with dual layer support.

A total of three USB 2.0 ports are available and one mini FireWire port. There's also one PC Card expansion slot and a VGA output. For networking the S6410 includes gigabit Ethernet, a 56k Modem, Bluetooth and the aforementioned Wi-Fi connectivity.