This one is a DOG (Fujitsu Siemens Amilo M3438G)

Member Name: SweetViolet

Product:	Fujitsu Siemens Amilo M3438G
Date:	04/03/06 (386 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Nice graphics

Disadvantages: Cursor jumps all over the place; lame trackpad setup

Sorry, but I can't recommend this one to anybody who has a right hand. The track pad has a scroll bar attached to the right of it which cannot be disabled, and every time your hand hovers over it (like when you are pressing the space bar) the thing activates and sends your cursor skittering off into never-never land. I have lost entire pages of written work, I have ended up on different pages of a website than the one I was on, I have had uploads aborted, all by moving my hand too close to the bar. There is a disable switch, but it disables the bar, the trackpad, AND the right and left buttons. It is all or nothing...and when you click the disable button to re-enable the track pad...well, I lost twenty minutes of technical work out into the ether with just that one little click!

Additionally, there is something weird programmed into some of the punctuation keys: when you type a quote mark (") it doesn't show up on the screen until the next key is pressed. If you want a space after the quote mark, you have to space twice. Also, sometimes when typing a quote mark, instead of the quote you can get the next letter you type but with an umlaut (two dots) over the top of it. There is nothing in the manual to indicate these "features" exist or how to disable them.

I expected the computer to be heavy---it is. I expected it to have a dismally short battery life---it does. I did not, however, expect the unit to heat up so badly that my wrists hae to be lifted up from the cover! (The work space is not only well ventilated, the unit sits atop a rubber-coated wire cooling rack!) I also did not expect it to be so slow in accessing the net...my 18 month old Acer Aspire 2023 was twice as fast fetching websites on the same wireless LAN.

The colour is great, the screen resolution is great, the capacity is great, but this thing is a real pain to use. I am sorry I bought it.

Summary: The cons outweigh the pros, especially if you want to use it for writing.

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