Fujitsu LifeBook E8020

The Fujitsu LifeBook E8020 is a fairly large seven-pound notebook with a metallic blue lid that gives it a cool look. Some of its features, like its strong graphics and DVD burner, will appeal to home users, but it makes more sense for business users who need a powerful and secure desktop replacement.

Whether you’re a home or office user, you’ll appreciate the outstanding processing power the E8020 offers, courtesy of its 2-GHz Intel Pentium M 760 processor, 512MB of 533-MHz dual-channel DDR2 memory, and 5,400-rpm 80GB hard drive. It scored a very impressive 232 in the MobileMark productivity benchmark. We simultaneously encoded MP3s, edited five-megapixel photos, and recalculated spreadsheets, and this notebook was easily up to the task.

The LifeBook E8020 comes with a wealth of external interfaces. There are four USB 2.0 ports, a FireWire port, an IR transceiver, and S-Video, in addition to three antiquated parallel, serial, and PS/2 interfaces that will only come in handy for older peripherals. Beyond that, the E8020 includes both a PC Card slot and an MMC/SD card reader for transferring digital photos quickly. Fujitsu gives a nod to the future by including an ExpressCard slot, though currently there aren’t any devices that take advantage of this new interface’s speed.

Whether  you’re burning files to disc or making copies of your home movies, you’ll appreciate the installed double-layer DVD burner. InterVideo DVD Creator Plus and Sonic RecordNow! are included for editing video and burning video and data files to disc.

The E8020 features a 15-inch screen that offers a crisp SXGA+ resolution of 1400 x 1050 pixels. The anti-glare coating makes the display less bright and glossy than many other notebooks in this class, but this LCD does its job well. If you’d rather have the glossy screen, you can configure the system with a CrystalView display ($75 less), but its resolution is only 1024 x 768 pixels. Fujitsu chose to forego a widescreen display, a design choice that may put off frequent DVD movie viewers and 3D gamers.

The system’s ATI Mobility Radeon X600 graphics processor flew through Halo with crisp detail and without a hint of jerkiness. The 3DMark2001 score of 11,478 is not the best we’ve seen, but there’s more than enough grahics horsepower here for graphics work. The E8020 is touted more towards business use, so if you have no need for gaming or video editing, you can skip the ATI card and save $100 by going with the Intel 915GM integrated graphics chipset.

Business users will like having a Trusted Platform Module security chip on board, which works with four numbered buttons above the keyboard and the installed Security Panel Application. You can configure this application to make users enter a security code to access the system.

For networking, the choices are very expansive. In addition to a Gigabit Ethernet port, there’s Bluetooth and a tri-mode 802.11a/b/g adapter. The Wi-Fi connection offers great wireless performance; it delivered very good throughput of 17.4 Mbps at 5 feet from our access point, which dropped only a bit to 15.9 Mbps at 50 feet.

The LifeBook E8020 offers fair battery life for a large system, lasting 3 hours and 12 minutes in our tests. Keep in mind that the Wi-Fi adapter draws a lot of power when it’s on; it dropped the runtime to 2 hours and 43 minutes. Fortunately, there’s an easy-to-reach Wi-Fi On/Off switch right on the front of the system.

Throw in a comfortable full-sized keyboard, a pointing stick/touchpad navigation combo, and a removable optical drive bay that can be replaced with an optional $134 secondary battery in seconds, and the E8020 is a good jack-of-all-trades laptop. At $2,249, it’s a bit of an investment, particularly since it comes with a mere one-year warranty, but if you need a desktop replacement notebook for both work and play, the Fujitsu LifeBook E8020 delivers.