It is almost one month now that I am using Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) on my new Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo si 1520 laptop. And, believe it or not: I still like it. Since I have installed Ubuntu I have booted Windows Vista twice. Once for the installation of the new firmware for my WLAN router. The guys at Siemens thought it would be clever to put the files into a self extracting .exe file. As I did not know what to do with the thing in Linux I just saved it and changed to Windows to extract it. Second time was yesterday to see whether I could connect with the router using windows, as I had some trouble to connect to my wireless network with Ubuntu 7.04. Finally I managed to solve the problem. » Read the rest of the entry..

Battery life of the FSC Amilo is OK but not exceptionally good. Especially from a sub notebook I would expect a little more working time when using the battery. This does not represent a scientific test, it is just about my experiences when working with this notebook.

Windows Vista

With the WLAN on and the screen on the highest brightness the laptop will not survive 3 hours (approx. 2:45 hours), without WLAN and a dimmed screen battery life can be prolonged. In this case it will last about 3:15-3:30 hours.

Ubuntu 7.04

My impression is that with Linux battery life is slightly better. With WLAN and a bright screen I can work for about 3 hours, when I dim the screen and switch of WLAN this goes up to 4 hours (3:5o - 4:00).

Buy the Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Si 1520 12,0 Inch Notebook (Intel Core Duo T7200 2,0 GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, DVD+- DL RW, Vista Premium)

When I have more information on this or something has changed I will update this. Please do not forget, this is not an objective test, but my subjective impression.

After more than 6 years with my old notebook (a HP Omnibook XE3 with a mobile PIII processor, 256 MB memory and a 20GB hard disk) I finally bought a new laptop.

Requirements

My wish list for the new computer was:

• A small screen, maximum 14 inch
• Light weight
• A dual core processor
• At least 1024 MB of memory
• A reasonable sized hard disk (at least 80GB)
• Good battery live
• No glare screen
• A docking station with DVI
• Reasonable priced

Quite a list, right? So, as always in life, I had to make some compromises. I had to sacrifice a few of the requirements listed above, but I think I have found a product that came quite close to “my ideal notebook”. » Read the rest of the entry..