Fujitsu Lifebook C332 review

If you'd rather have a modest PC you can easily carry about than a supersystem effectively rooted to the spot, you're not alone.

A great number of home users, small business workers and students are waking up to the advantages of notebooks, and that's why most manufacturers now have a low-cost model aimed squarely at them. In Fujitsu's case, it's the Lifebook C332.

The C332 is big for a portable, and, at 3.5kg, heavy with it. The plus side of this is that it feels built to last, with a solid lid offering plenty of protection for the screen, and little in the way of worrying flexibility in the body. This sort of robustness and simplicity is sensible for the target market, but other aspects of the design are, unfortunately, far from perfect.

Our first quibble came when we looked at upgrading the memory. With 32Mb as standard, this would be a sensible move for anyone wanting to push the Lifebook a little bit harder. Luckily, there's a DIMM slot available beneath the keyboard. But, in order to lift the keyboard, you need to remove two cover plates, and then two screws that hold it in place. The screws will help keep the keyboard secure in use, but the flimsy plastic covers are the sort of thing that are guaranteed to get lost or broken.

A more serious problem is the notebook's pointing device. Instead of using a trackball, trackpad or trackpoint, Fujitsu has chosen to introduce us to the horrors of ErgoTRAK. We hated this bizarre joypad. While it steadily becomes more usable with practice, it's hardly intuitive, and if you've got any need for delicacy you'll soon get fed up with it. Desk-bound users would be well advised to plug in a mouse at the earliest opportunity.

The Lifebook's keyboard on the other hand isn't bad at all, with large keys, a good length of travel and an intelligent layout, complete with function and page navigation keys, a spacebar you can hit with every try and well-sized return, tab and shift keys.

Fujitsu hasn't skimped on the connections either. You've got the traditional two stacked Type II PC Card slots, along with serial, parallel, VGA and USB ports at the back, and the PS/2 and audio sockets on the right hand side. There's no internal modem, however, which would certainly have been a good inclusion for the home user. If you want to get hooked up to the Internet, you'll need to pay extra for a PC Card device.

Cost-cutting is most apparent in the screen. Owners of expensive notebooks are spoiled with 14.1in TFT screens that run beautifully at an ambitious 1,024x768 resolution. The rest of us have to put up with 12.1in TFT screens that can only manage 800x600 in 256,000 colours, and that's what we have here. Still, if your main work consists of word processing, with the odd bit of e-mail or web-browsing, that's going to be fine. So, while the Lifebook's screen tends to be more gloom than glam, it's workable.

Battery life isn't a great strength either. Even with a Lithium Ion cell, the C332 only managed an hour and fifty minutes of flat-out work in our tests. This is a bit below average.

It was in performance, though, that the Lifebook most disappointed. This is the first notebook we've seen using Intel's new mobile Celeron, and it seems the chip lags some way behind the low power PII. In fact, the new Celeron doesn't seem that much faster than a straight Pentium MMX of the same clock speed.

Though we have a few complaints to make about this notebook, we didn't expect perfection for £999, and this isn't a bad effort at all (as long as you can live with the atrocious ErgoTRAK). That having been said, it's not the best bargain in the world either. Previous entry-level hits like the Hi-Grade Notino AS7200 (issue 96) would be a better bet, or, for first-timers, the Packard Bell Easy Note (issue 95).