Travel Technology - Fujitsui laptops - good machinery or crap?

My friend's looking to replace the crappy Sony Vaio laptop, and is looking at the Fujitsu N3010-55.

Any good?

Ah, another example of differing prospectives... I dumped a Fujitsu, several years ago, to get the Viao we have now. I don't have the model numbers, but I was VERY unhappy with Fujitsu's service department. We have to ship the laptop back for any needed service, and they DON'T pay for the shipping, we do. Slow, and they never got back to me with the requested (several times) information on purchasing screen replacement insurance.

Kate

ThinkPad ThinkPad ThinPad.... http://www.flyertalk.com/travel/fttravel_forum/thumbsup.gif

Having supplied to Fujitsu.... They have some REALLY good notebooks and some horrible ones.

See the earlier thread on the Best Buy cust svc issue.

I outlined there that the mfr, means NOTHING... It's the price point on the notebook, who builds it and how much leeway the company building it had to supply higher quality components

FACT: Not all IBM notebooks are made by IBM either... So just blindly looking at brand name doesn't work.

Typically home/personal user notebooks will be the most cost sensitive and thus reflect it on quality.

Corporate notebooks will be the opposite.

Good hunting...

Thanks for the info. We'll see how the fujitsu notebook holds up.

My friend returned his VAIO laptop after it refused to install several programs, and Fry's folks appear to have damaged it further in trying to fix it. No more VAIO!

My Fujitsu S-series is a wonderful machine. Better than the Dell previously owned.

The last time I looked, Fuji was a mid-tier product accorsing to Gartner. The top tier consisted of Compaq (ok, HP), IBM & Dell. I have no real-life experience with Fujitsus.

Personally, I'm a Thinkpad fanatic.

Another positive vote for the IBM ThinkPad series.

MisterNice

Good point about not all IBM's being built by IBM. The way I see it, all computer manufacturers are very much like the car makers. They have their brand on a car/notebook, but then source various parts from various sources. In the end, however, brand does matter - especially when it comes to service and support. Plus, in the case of IBM, I think they are more reliable than others because they tend to test drive their new options more than others (are are therefore a little later to offer the latest specs), but in the end it just makes their ThinkPads a better product. Needless to say, Im a die hard ThinkPad junkie.

I have to admit that I am looking at the Fujitsu n3010 as a new machine for at home. From a quick perusal at Fry's, the screen looks to me to be the best screen that I have ever seen on a laptop. All other laptops that I have seen have an image that is highly dependent on the angle of view and when you view pictures or videos, the picture changes whith fairly small changes in viewing angle. The n3010 appears to be closer to one of the plasma TVs with a wide viewing angle. A friend of mine who recently visited Japan reported that a number of the latest Japanese laptops are adopting this style of screen-so other manufacturers may follow suit in the near future.

I've had 3 different Fujitsu laptops, all have been real troupers and never had problems with any of them.

My current one is a C7631. I real Sherman Tank, IMHO. Been through just about every drop, crash, crush, heat, dust, dirt, sand test I could subject it to, and it's still humming.

Functionally, the only problem I have ever had was after I did a Windows Service Pack Update once, and the third-party sound card that Fujitsu added to the bundle, stopped working. I downloaded the latest driver and that didn't help, so I just disabled that third-party sound card altogether and went with whatever the default Windows sound card is on the thing, and it works just fine.

Don't really blame Fujitsu so much on that as I do the third-party sound card company, for not having a fix...and Microsoft for screwing up the thing with their patch to begin with!

I'm a relative newcomer to Fujitsu, having used Dells for the past 4 years, but I love my two month old P5010.