Review of Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li2727 laptop.

For the purpose of this review I will refer to the laptop as the 'Amilo'.

I purchased this laptop in May 2008 to replace my previous laptop, a Dell Inspiron which I unfortunately 'killed' with a super powerful, metal detecting magnet...a long story and not one I intend to go into here!

The laptop was purchased from a Tesco supermarket for around £280.00. To be perfectly honest, I bought this on price alone, I needed a replacement laptop and this seemed the best deal Tesco could offer. I felt it was a decent price and of course buying from Tesco, I also got club card points!

**The Laptop**

This review is not going to be a technical orientated write up, I am no technical expert and although fascinated by computers, most of their functions are beyond me, as long as I can use a computer for what I need to do, I am content and that is enough for me!
The Amillo has a smooth, shiny silver plastic outer casing, I believe it also comes in black, but when I bought mine, there was no choice offered. The keyboard is housed in a textured black plastic casing and it is a standard 'qwerty' layout with no bells and whistles to speak of. The touch pad and left/right click buttons are located in the centre of the space below the keyboard and they are very sensitive and responsive. The USB ports and power cable socket are located on the left side of the laptop.
All other sockets and connections are at the back, other than the CD drive which is on the right hand side.

The screen measures approximately 15.5" the visual and audio quality are excellent. The laptop is preloaded with the Windows Vista Basic Home operating system. The main specs of the machine are as follows:-
1.86GHz Dual Core Intel Processor
1024MB RAM
160GB Hard Drive
DVD Rewriter
4 USB ports
Weight 2.7 kg

**In The Box**

The laptop. Obviously!
A user manual, which to be honest I have found pretty useless as it is not very user friendly as in places it is too technical, yet skips over the points I would like to read more about!
A power cable.
12 month Guarantee information.

**Setting up**

As far as I recall, this was simple. I am not known for my patience and tend to want things to work immediately, so as I cannot remember any major issues, I presume the set up was trouble free. I know I had to burn my own "restore" CDs using blank disks, which I found a pain. Having just had a flick through the user manual, I see that one can order them from the manufacturer for a couple of pounds, should you not wish to produce your own.

**In Use**

This laptop is not a high end, super duper, all singing, all dancing model. I use it mainly for surfing the internet, email, photo storage, writing and other basic functions.
I also use the Amillo to watch DVD's when travelling, the playback quality is very good indeed. The sound is fine for me, although my partner, who has hearing problems, does struggle a little with the sound quality. He has used the laptop with headphones and said that it seemed better with them.

One major drawback with this laptop in my opinion, is that there is no SD card slot. We tend to take lots of digital photographs when travelling and it is a pain to have to use the camera cable to down load photos in the move. This is something I will ensure my next laptop has when the time to replace comes around.
A minor irritation is the noisy fan. This can be set to run silently by using keys FN and F11 together, but to be honest, I never remember to do this!

Battery life has never been a strong point with this laptop and now at 4 years old, I find it will run for a mere 1.25 hours on a full charge. There are 'Eco' settings built into the laptop, if used, these will put the laptop into standby mode much more quickly than in the normal setting and the screen is less bright. Again this is one of those things that I always mean to use, but always seem to forget.

I am not a gamer, although I do play the games available on websites such as Facebook. The Amilo is fine for this type of game, but obviously I cannot comment of the laptop's efficiency for other types of game. Given the low memory capacity, I would say that it is not really up to modern gaming. .

**My Thoughts and Conclusion**

The Amilo is a reasonable looking laptop and whilst it is true that there are no fancy design details or features, not even a web cam, it is a practical and easy to use machine. The keyboard and touch-pad look good and are nice to use. The keys are very responsive and I find I can whiz around the keyboard with ease. Having trained many years ago to touch-type, I find that many laptop keyboards are a little cramped for me and my fast typing habits, consequently, annoying typos can occur. Not so with the Amillo, the keyboard suits me very well.
The memory and hard-drive built into this laptop are small by today's standards, but I have found them to be perfectly adequate for my requirements. I must admit that I transfer my photos and other important documents to an external hard-drive every so often and I also make use of USB flash drives for storage.

This laptop has served me very well, considering it was a cheap bargain buy, I think four years of virtually daily use has really put it through it's paces. It is beginning to creak and groan a little these days and it has suffered a couple of annoying crashes. Another fault has developed recently with the left click button, it appears to be wearing out and does not always respond immediately.
I do find the lack of SD card slot annoying and the fact that the battery life is decreasing is also an inconvenience, however for the money, this laptop has been a wonderful buy. This model is still available on sites such as Ebay for prices starting around £50 and there are lots of replacement parts and accessories available on line too.

Interestingly, a friend of my daughters runs a computer repair business and he has advised me that this Amilo model is one of the easiest laptops to upgrade and he has offered to upgrade and refurbish mine if I chose not to buy a new laptop.
All in all, I would recommend this laptop, it has been used as a bit of a workhorse and has stood up to the task well. I think four years continuous use is a lot to expect from a cheap computer and this Amilo laptop has exceeded my expectations.

I am awarding the Amillo a 4 * rating, dropping a star for the lack of SD slot and the short battery life.
Thank you for reading

©brittle1906 April 2012
N.B. My reviews may be found on other sites under the same user name.