Fujitsu Siemens Amilo M 6450G review

Intel's Core Duo and Core Solo processors may have grabbed the limelight, but the older Pentium M processors are still pretty fast.

They're also a little cheaper, which makes them a good choice for budget notebooks, such as Fujitsu Siemens' Amilo M 6450G.

Fujitsu Siemens has opted for a Pentium M 735 processor, which runs at 1.7GHz. However, it's one of the older range of processors, with a 400MHz frontside bus. Later Pentium Ms have a 533MHz bus, which improves system performance and memory access.

This explains the Amilo M 6450G's benchmark results, which showed it to be a little slow in our application tests. We've seen plenty of faster notebooks at this price, and some manufacturers even offer dual-core processors. The 6450G will coast through day-to-day tasks, though, and office applications and web browsing will be no problem.

Battery life was also unexceptional and fell a little below our preferred three hours of light use. Don't expect to play games, either, as the Intel GMA 900 graphics chipset failed in our benchmarks. It's not all bad news, though. The 80GB hard disk is generous in a notebook at this price, as is the two-layer DVD writer.

Notebook computers are not just about performance, however; design and usability are equally important. Here the Amilo M 6450G fares better. Its chassis is compact and designed around a 14" widescreen display. It's the perfect size for mobility, but the mediocre battery limits its usefulness.

The screen is quite bright but had a bluish tinge when displaying a white screen. Its gloss coating makes it good for watching films and looking at pictures, and there's no noticeable grain on the screen to detract from the image. Colours weren't the most vibrant we've seen on a notebook computer, but they were well blended in our colour wheel test.

The keyboard is better still, as it uses the whole width of the chassis. This makes it spacious and means that all the keys are an acceptable size. The individual keys are firm to the touch and have a decent amount of travel. It's a great keyboard and a real pleasure to type on. The touch pad is proportioned to the widescreen display. It could have been a little bigger, but it's accurate and the buttons are responsive.

There's the usual range of ports around the edges, but only three USB2 ports are provided. However, it also has a memory card reader that supports SD, MS and MMC formats.

There's little wrong with the 6450G, but you can get a better-specified notebook at this price.