Fujitsu Siemens Amilo M 7400 review

The idea behind Intel's Centrino portable technology is to produce slimline notebooks with decent battery life - and for the most part, the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo M 7400 fits this bill.

Its battery life is impressive, as we'd hoped it would be, lasting just under two-and-a-quarter hours in our tests. Granted, this doesn't mean it could hold out for a full day's worth of work, but it'll keep going for train journeys and presentations.
It may be thin at 3cm, but it's quite large, too - and at 2.6kg, it'll quickly become tiresome to lug around. However, this size has its benefits. First, it comes with a large, 15in TFT screen. It's surprisingly good, too, with a resolution of 1,024x768 and very wide viewing angles - we could still read text when we were practically side-on to the screen.
It's a pity that the graphics chip isn't very powerful. Intel's 855 chip is not intended for gaming, as the score of 1,919 in our 3D gaming benchmarks, 3DMark 2001, indicates. As the chip shares 8MB of the notebook's main memory, the score is no great surprise. There's nothing to stop you increasing the memory available to the graphics chip to boost performance, but this will have an adverse effect on everyday system use. Nevertheless, the screen is still ideal for watching films, and text is crystal clear.
Another advantage of the Amilo's wide chassis is that it has plenty of room for ports around the sides, without compromising its sleek, bevelled look. On the left-hand side there's an infra-red port and a Type II PC Card slot - all pretty standard. Far less usual in a notebook at this price is the built-in memory card reader, which handles SD, MMC and Memory Stick cards. Below the card reader is a volume control, although it's unmarked and easy to miss.
Round the back you'll find networking and 56K modem ports, three USB 2 ports, a parallel port, an S-Video outputs and a standard VGA connector, enabling you to use the Amilo with an external monitor. Fujitsu Siemens has also managed to squeeze in a FireWire port, although it's a mini four-pin version, which doesn't supply power to devices that are hooked up to it. Finishing off the rear is a microphone mini-jack port and an optical S/P-DIF audio out. On the right-hand side, there's a fitting for Kensington security lock.
The notebook's CD-RW/DVD combo drive is at the front of the machine. Front-mounted drives are useful as they provide easy access, but we found that the open button was too easy to press by accident - annoying when you're installing a program or listening to a CD. We were also disappointed by the lack of manual switch for the included 802.11b wireless card. An activation switch can speed up its use considerably.
The rest of the chassis is no bed of roses either. We had quite a problem with the keyboard. While the main letter and number keys are large and well arranged, others - particularly the cursor keys - are squeezed in around the sides, making them hard to get to grips with. All the keys feel uncomfortable to use, having very little give. Without keeping your eyes on the screen, you can't be sure whether a key press has actually registered. The touchpad, on the other hand, is very comfortable, as are its two buttons and jog wheel - although it could have used more of the available space.
There's very little to complain about inside this notebook, though. Its 1.4GHz Pentium-M processor won't set any speed records, and earns just 934 points in our 2D benchmarks, which test a PC's performance with everyday tasks. That said, it's more than powerful enough for office applications and surfing the Net - and the 512MB 333MHz SDRAM supplied will keep Windows XP running smoothly.