I bought a Fujitsu E-series last year, and love it. Since then, I had recommend people to buy Fujitsu laptops. Most of them are happy with their purchase. When my brother want to buy a laptop, I also ask him to checkout Fujitsu. After carefully comparing with other brands, such as Sony, Toshiba, Compaq and Dell, he decided to go with the C-7631.

I had chance to play with the machine for few days, and I like it too.

Exterior
This laptop definitely looks cool and fancy. It has silverish magnesium cover, like most other Fujitsu laptops. The only problem with the exterior is that the 15.1" LCD screen overhang on top of the base of the laptop. It is just a minor problem though.

Features
Boy! This thing is feature rich
Processor - 1Gig Pentium III
Memory - 256 MB
Screen - 15.1" XGA
HD - 30 Gig (he spent $50 to upgrade from 20 to 30)
CDRW/DVD
ATI 8MB Graphic Card
Yamaha Sound Chip
4 USB Ports
IEEE 1394 Firewire
S-Video Out
Parallel Port
Built-In Ethernet and Modem
3 Audio Input/Output
Built-In Floopy Drive

What else do you want?

Software
There is not much to say about the software. The XP Home edition, with some Fujitsu maintenance software, plus Microsoft Work Suite, which is good for student who can't afford MS Office. I like the Moviemaker in XP too, but that is not related to this review.

Speaker
I was hoping the speaker would be better than my E-series, since the C-series is a multimedia laptop. While it sounds better, the sound quality is still very lacking. You would definitely need to invest in either a headphone or PC speaker system for DVD and audio.

S-Video Out
The video out work fine, and I was able to watch DVD on my Sony Trinitron without problem.

Size
Put it side by side with my E-series, this thing definitely looks bigger and thicker. Its screen looks significantly larger too. Weight wise, it is not much different though, but it does not fit into my laptop bag. So be careful when buying bag for this beast.

Performance
The C-7631 is running at 100 MHz system bus speed. So it is not the cutting edge laptops that run 133 MHz. There are newer C-series that run 133 MHz. Also, the 8MB ATI Video Card is also not the cream of graphic cards, so you can't expect top of the line 3D graphics performance 3D from it. But for DVD watching and less demanding games, I don't have any problem with it.

Overall
This is a reasonably price desktop replacement laptop. It's metallic silver color seperate it from other brands. Featurewise, it has everything you would expect from a full-feature laptop.

If you are not going to travel a lot with it, I would recommend taking a hard look in the C-series. Otherwise, the S-series or the P-series is really cool.


Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 1450
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 15
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 21-30