If you really must buy a PC instead of a macbook... (Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pi 2515)

Member Name: AndrewPo

Product:	Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pi 2515
Date:	02/07/08 (377 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Inexpensive, quite robust, good screen

Disadvantages: battery life is not great

Updated with a lot more detail.

This is a very good-value laptop. It is relatively inexpensive, at about £550, but comes with a good feature set, reasonably fast dual-core Intel processor (1.8 GHz), but the 2GB of RAM means it will actually run surprising fast with some more memory intensive software (e.g. photo-editing software). It also comes with a large disk drive (minimum 120 GB but larger ones are also available) It seems robust and well-made although I have mostly used it at home and have treated it carefully, so I haven't really tested this assumption. The screen opens and closes fairly smoothly and doesn't feel fragile like some cheaper models, although I still treat it carefully because I have had laptops in the past that in later life have started to flex near the hinges.

The Fujisu Siemens Amilo Pi 2515 has Microsoft Vista home premium installed, which has been surprisingly robust, rarely crashing. Vista Home Premium provides a good feature set to cover most of my non-business needs, without needing to pay the extra for the more advance versions of the software. I use Apple Macs as my work computers. Vista is not my preferred operating system as I have been using unix for almost 20 years, so I would prefer either Linux or Apple Mac OS X which are both based on unix instead of Microsoft DOS, but most people however will be very familiar with Vista.

The finish and feel of the casing are good when compared to the cheapest of it's competition, with dual colour, silver and black, casing that makes it seem slimmer, although not as stylish as some more expensive models such as my Apple MacBook nor as indestructible as my old IBM T42. The keyboard also has a reasonable "weight" to the keys, which don't feel flimsy, as can be the case with cheap laptops. I find the touch-pad annoying. It is too sensitive for me and the tap to select function gets triggered all the time when I don't want it to. This can actually be adjusted or turned off, but I haven't found the right settings yet, for me, and I share this computer with someone else who finds these setting almost perfect. Plugging in a mouse, of course, resolves the problem completely.

The screen is very clear, sharp and bright and a good size, 15.4", which makes it big enough to use for photo-editing etc. but without being too big to carry. Battery life is not great, often lasting less than 2 hours, but acceptable, and a spare battery would be a good idea if using it away from a power socket.

Overall the Fujisu Siemens Amilo Pi 2515 laptop it is a very good package that looks and feels a cut above many similarly priced laptops.

Summary: Good inexpensive laptop

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