Fujitsu Lifebooks U904 and S904 look pretty awesome

Not me, sorry. A fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04 (daily cd image) was a breeze, though

 

I used my own windows 8.1 CD (bought my own key) along with an external USB DVD. Funny thing is, I don't have to input the key. Windows was activated the moment it booted up the first time. Finally I used fujitsu software download manager to download all drivers for the notebook. it was pretty straight forward nothing too complicated. My boot time now is about 8-10 sec (faster than factory windows 8.1)

 

For those of you interested in U904. I am selling mine on NBR Marketplace. Nothing wrong with the notebook. It is a good one. I've done all I can upgrading the notebook (memory and ssd). Time for me to move on and get a different one (I buy and sell notebook a few times a year - kinda hobby)


http://forum.notebookreview.com/notebooks-desktops-sale/747561-fs-fujitsu-u904-ultrabook-spfc-u904-001-i5-4300u-10gb-memory-120gb-samsung-evo-ssd.html

 

Just got my boss to get me an S904 to replace my aging Toshiba M750.
I got the i5 with the QHD Non-touch Matte Screen, 8GB RAM, Hybrid drive (switched to a Samsung 830 i had ready). I wanted the i5 for better battery life, and while touch would have been nice, I couldn't make up any work reason for it and at least I got a sunlight-readable screen. I think. I'll take some pictures later.

Impressions so far: Screen is pretty great but I'm still trying to find the ideal scale (175% would be the sweet spot but i can only go 150 or 200%. EDIT: Got it! It's not obvious but if you go to custom scaling, you can write custom values up top). The keyboard sucks compared to the old Toshiba one i had, but i'll get used to it. Laptop get a bit warm during hdd intensive taks (backups/updates)
I easily opened it up to replace the drive (lots of screws, but ok apart from that) and I'm running a clean install with all Fuji drivers added throught their App. Comes with recovery DVDs for win 7 and 8.1 and I have a Windows Home Server 2011, so I didn't need the recovery partition.
Battery life seems to be amazing. the estimate kept growing from 9h at 96% to 14h(!) at 58% (took 4-5 hours to drain that i think). I don't think i need the extra battery for all day use.
Radios pretty good. Wifi is dual channel, with great range and performance. The LTE is pretty great too. I can only get HSPDA speeds (limitation of my plan I think) but i got 12MB down/1.5MB up and not even in a great 3G spot.
Fingerprint Sensor works, no fancy features.
Webcam is great. Picks you up in complete darkness just using the screen's light. Still need to test the internal mic.
Weird thing is the Smartcard. It's in the BIOS and Windows detects it, but there's no opening for it in the chassis. Turned it off (along with BT) for battery saving.

I'll be using it for work all next week, and will post back on any issues I find.

 

Wow, a fortnight since any update to this thread.

Have you guys found a better alternative to the Fujitsu U904? Or the pricing has just made it unattractive?

 

Just curious - can we get feedback from those who received a U904 and have been using it for a while? Have your impressions changed after living with it for more than a day or two?

 

Hi
I updated BIOS to version 1.09 - do you know what it updates / resolve any issue?
I have had this PC for 4 months now and so far so good.

I had a couple of issues with the finger print reader - which got stuck a couple of times and had to disable it in BIOS. I wonder if the BIOS update might resolve this problem.

Still love the screen ... still hate the speakers!

Battery seem to last still long time and rarely the fan kick up !

 

I've had the S904 for just over a month now and am mostly happy.
I have a serious issue with the Intel GPU not waking up displays from sleep. Seems to be a massive ongoing concern: https://communities.intel.com/message/202922

So for me the temporary solution had to be to never switch off monitors.

Noise is so-so. When doing office work, the fan powers down completely. Also you can configure the Bios and Energy settings to throttle the CPU, rather than spinning up the fan.
Unfortunately I have to do some serious computing in virtual machines and start to wonder if getting an ULV Machine was the right thing to do. as I type, my CPU is running at 77% load (@2.94 GHz) and the ram use is at 92% (11.0/11.9GB), and my VMs (2x Win 2k8) are not doing a lot.

Subsequently, the fan noise is very noticeable at this point.

Maybe I should have kept my HP 2570p with 16GB and 3rd generation full voltage processor after all...

Also the focus on ultra low power consumption became a bit frustrating. After running several tests, I could get the machine to use as little as 3.8W when everything was idle and had 6.7W to 8.1W power consumption when playing back a 1080p h.264 Video over Wifi (resulting battery life would be 9.1 to 19.5 hours with 74 Wh battery). Now when putting serious load on the machine, power consumption can reach 20+W (so less than 4 hours battery life), so there's still no true (guaranteed) all-day computing with it.

Worse: Since i installed a Samsung 1TB 840 EVO SSD which I bought only because it was supposed to have the lowest power consumption of all SSDs (as discussed with myself in this thread before), the lowest recorded power consumption was 5.6W (1.8W more than with a Crucial M4 - when doing absolutely nothing!), so either Samsung is cheating on the benchmarks, or my unit is crap. So I'm going to dump that Samsung SSD and go back to a Crucial SSD instead, will probably try the M550. Factory fitted was a Toshiba SSD by the way, but I didn't measure its power consumption.

Also annoying, on the hunt for the best battery life: If you plug the Laptop in at more than 89%, it won't charge the battery. Unlike on my Sonys, there's no way to configure whether to charge to 60%; 80% or 100% (normally I'd have it set to 80 at home and 100 just before traveling) and the battery is wearing out very quickly (currently Batterybar is showing a capacity of 73894mWh from 76680mWh, but for some reason it stopped charging at 72414mWh). [No Option to strike through text?]
Edit: The previous sentence was wrong: there is in fact a battery utility that allows charging to either 80% or 100%. Still, if you plug the laptop at a charge level above 90%, it will not actually charge the battery.

Still love the formfactor and the fact that it is the only no-compromise 13" Laptop on the market today (as far as I am aware anyway).

 

How many people are running linux on the U904? Are most things working?

 

That's the reason why I love Fujitsu, they literally think of everything. Overcharging or discharging will reduce the lifespan of the Lithium Ion battery faster!

 

Maybe you have the Fujitsu Battery Utility installed and it is set to charge the battery only to 80%. Several users and I over at TPCR use this utility to extend our overall life of the battery (not battery life!). Fujitsu claims that a Li-Ion battery charged up at only 80% lasts about 1.5 times longer than being charged to 100%.

To get 100% charging for your battery use the Battery Utility and set it to 100%. There are only these two settings - 80 and 100%.

 

Actually, I was wrong and you are right - my bad.
There is a battery utility and a "battery discharge setting" that can be configured to 80% (like I always used to configure my Vaios), so that's neat.
Still, there's no way to "force charge" it (from 90% or more) to 100%, but then again, that shouldn't really matter when using the battery utility sensibly in the future.

I agree and am aware that having a battery constantly fully charged is bad for it, hence my previous pattern with Vaios, that I would charge to 60% when stationary for a long time, 80% in everyday usage and 100% just before long trips. Example right now: The Laptop hasn't been undocked all week, so 60% would have been fine. But tomorrow, I'll be traveling with no access to an outlet for 14 hours, so 100% would be good now. Anyway, it's stuck at 97% and the only way to charge beyond that level would be to undock, discharge to below 90% and then redock.

 

Yes, that sounds frustrating. That Battry Utility is not very well designed and poorly documented.
I had a problem with getting it to run properly on my T902 with W8 pro. The component named "Battery Daemon" wouldn't run as an automated task and both batteries would charge up to 100%. I contacted Fujitsu but they couldn't help either, just found it out on my own...

I hope you find a workaround that suits your needs, but this shouldn't be happening on a business oriented and priced device.

 

I am running it with Ubuntu 14.04 beta, and everything works well. Port replicator included (with DP output with 2560x1440 resolution). Suspend on closing the lid works too (and it won't suspend when docked).

I haven't tried the 3g/4g/lte modem yet since I don't have a full sized SIM card around anymore, and I need to figure out exactly how I want to use it before I decide for a contract or prepaid plan :/

The key travel on the keyboard improves significantly over a few days.

Not all headphones work well with the laptop (eg. my Klipsch S4s, for example, don't), and a set of Sony noise-cancelling ear-buds from my gf do work. Haven't tried any other.

The only three things that bother me are:
1. I can only get ~5h of actual battery life (I'll probably get something like Anker Astro Pro2 to see if I can live with that as an extra battery) with wifi on, all on my version without a touchscreen; maybe 6h if I was just typing and surfing (it only goes down to <7w in that case)
2. The fan: this has been brough up, but it does indeed have an annoying wheezing sound; it annoys me most with Google Hangouts, as they stress the CPUs (hangouts are the new flash )
3. Screen brightness goes from very bright to several pretty bright levels, but then drops off significantly into a very dim setting; settings in-between would be most useful for indoor use, and would allow me to save a few more watts of power

To be honest, I am most disappointed with the battery life. Turning off the screen and ssh-ing in and running powertop shows the usage to be <4w, so the screen seems to be the main culprit, and not the wifi.

As for resolution, I like it, but this resolution is definitely not high enough for me. 260dpi but if you turn off subpixel rendering (not to mention hinting: hinting is a process where font outline is aligned with integer pixel boundaries—just a simplification), you can see jagged edges on the fonts (in practice, subpixel rendering increases the resolution since each of the R/G/B "lights" is treated as a separate pixel; of course, this is a very bad simplification of the process, but you get the gist). I guess I'll only be happy with 500 or so dpi

Scaling works pretty well in Ubuntu 14.04: that's where it is being introduced. Some programs do not switch when the system scale setting is changed (mostly firefox and chrome, which have their own settings), and others get messed up (eg. xchat-gnome's main chat window; emacs reads the settings only on start-up), but overall I am quite happy (especially since I am have scale=1.0 on my docked screen and scale=1.38 on laptop screen). These are features that have been improved over the last few months in Ubuntu, so I am sure that at least Firefox will be updated (if it isn't already, I might need to restart it after the latest updates).

I'll try to find the time for a more in-depth review, but somehow, the time is always scarce

 

Thanks, Данило--for your very detailed review. The U904 looks beautiful, and from what you've written it looks like linux runs pretty well on it, maybe even better than linux on the Thinkpad T440s. Thanks also for pointing out the problem areas, especially the battery life and fan. What do you think about the overall build quality? Is it solid? Right now I'm actually leaning toward the HP Elitebook 850--it's somewhat heavier than the U904 but it has one feature that seems to be missing on many laptops these days--a latched panel that gives very easy access to memory, hard drive, etc.

 

So I replaced the 1TB Samsung 840 Evo with a 1TB Crucial M550, power consumption is back down from 5.6W to 3.7W (!)

This is probably not the right forum (I should write some Amazon reviews and comment in the SSD Thread), but consider yourself warned: Do not go for the Samsung SSD!

It's a POS really, cheating on speed with it's "Turbowrite" Memory and Rapid Mode Ramdisk, having less reliable TLC (vs MLC) Memory, asking you to Overprovision manually (rather than delivering it internally), but the massive difference in Power Consumption really was the final straw.

 

Wow. That's a huge power difference: at what brightness setting is that? I somehow suspect you can get such big savings from an SSD alone, considering their average power draw should be around 1W for these models according to TomsHardware: Results: Power Consumption - The Crucial M550 SSD Review: Striking Back With More Performance (and the maximum observed for 840 Evo is ~3.2W, with the average being 1.35W).

Fwiw, m550 did worse than 840 evo in all of the tests, so you either got a dud or your testing conditions were not comparable.

And yes, Samsung 840 Evo is designed not to be the top-level SSD (which is why I went with the 840 Pro), but price comparable with other cheaper vendors. It's probably a great drive, but it is not the best you can get from Samsung, but a best value for money from Samsung.

 

The build quality is solid. The laptop feel very nice, and a friend who's all Macs (MacBook 13 Pro retina is his current laptop, but has had Air 13, 11, iMac 27, MacBook Pro 17 waay back) has really liked the feel of it.

I haven't had a single problem, but it was not put together very carefully: for instance, when you close it, the front left of the screen protrudes by ~0.5mm (~1/50 of an inch) from the bottom to the side, and vice versa on the right side. Basically, it seems as if the hinges have been ever so slightly misaligned (or perhaps one is screwed down more tightly than the other). Doesn't bother me, but I noticed it ~5 days after owning the laptop (basically, you close it and pull your finger over the edge on one side and that's how you notice it).

 

I haven't seen this brought up, but NotebookCheck has updated their review with the review for the matte screen version: Review Update Fujitsu LifeBook U904-0M75A1DE Ultrabook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews

 

- Brightness was two levels above minimum (two times FN+Brightness up), whatever that means in percent.
- Yes, I agree that it seams unlogical for the SSD to draw that much power, hence my suspicion that the unit may have been faulty: But I swear it's true and at absolutely identical settings.
After all I had to clone the SSD, secure erase it, disassemble it from the Laptop, send it back to the seller and repeat with the new SSD AND pay more for the Crucial over the Samsung.
I would have rather avoided that.

My benchmarks were:
Available Memory (Partitioned)
Crucial M550: 953,87 GB
Samsung 840: 931,51 GB (while Samsung recommends reserving 10% for Overprovisioning!)

Read Speed:
Crucial M550: 552MB/s
Samsung 840: 552MB/s*

Write Speed
Crucial M550: 508 MB/s
Samsung 840: 526 MB/s*

IOPS Read:
Crucial M550: 85209
Samsung 840: 97684*

IOPS Write:
Crucial M550: 71213
Samsung 840: 88643*

*=(using Samsungs 12GB "Turbo Cache", performance dropped when dealing with more memory).

 

Btw, how is the sound on the U904? Is the sound output like a regular laptop, or does it have that "ultrabook"-type sound?

 

from what i've read here and elsewhere it is pretty bad, even worse than typical ultrabook bad. The speakers themselves are tiny and directly face some protective foam (pics somewhere in this thread). The output of the headphone jack is said to be surprisingly good though.

 

If they are the same as on the S904, you'll prefer the speakers of your iPhone, which happens to be louder as well.

It's not the end of the world and acceptable for speech (like training videos or something) once you applied some tweaks (required) to boost the Volume, such as a Bios Setting and "Volume Boost in "DTS UltraPC II Plus" Tab of the Realtek HD Audio-Manager (found in the Control Panel), but at the end of the day, if you're looking for movies or music something like the "X-Mini Capsule Speaker" ($17 on Amazon) sounds better and provides 3-4 times the volume.

Genuinely curious: What would you want to use them for?

IMHO, Laptop Speakers are hardly ever anything to write home about (particularly on ultraportables), so I'd prefer using headphones, a headset or dedicated speakers under any circumstance.

 

Speakers are crap. I can't use them for online calls at all, so headphones are a must at all times. OTOH, the mic is useful, so you don't need a headset and earbuds will be fine (if you prefer to travel light).

 

HI Guys,
I know the question about build quality has been asked many times before. However some of the buyers at Amazon.DE have talked about bad build quality:
Amazon.de: Kundenrezensionen: Fujitsu LifeBook U904 35,6 cm (14 Zoll) Notebook (Intel Core i7 4600U, 3,3GHz, 10GB RAM, 256GB SSD, Win 8 Pro) silber

Especially by guys who have had it for a few months now.
Based on this now I am torn between this and the Toshiba Kirabook (2014). Any advice?

Cheers

 

Hi, I'm considering the U904. However, there are a couple of questions for owners:

1) With the Glossy Touch display, is there an air gap between the glass and the display panel? If yes, it will be a total deal-breaker for me. I have seen this horrible design on some ultrabooks (like Sony Vaio) and it doubles all reflections and ruins the contrast, which are not good to begin with on a glossy display.

2) Just to be 100% certain: the display has 3 sub-pixels for each pixel? Not any pentile-like garbage? I looked at the Samsung 13,3" 3200x1800 display in a store and it looked just like the Galaxy phones displays - like looking through a strange, messy grid of black holes. Pentile is definetly not for me.

 

FWIW, I can confirm that the Sierra Wireless EM7305 (LTE modem shipped with U904) works fine with Ubuntu 14.04. (I got a bit of scare due to requirement for the SIM card to be activated, but after digging out an old Nokia N900 with a full-sized SIM slot, I got it going and it was flawless from there). It did require rebooting for the SIM card to be seen.

Got 8/3.5Mbps on speedtest at one location: my connection is capped at 21/5.76, so couldn't get more than that, but Serbia is not very well covered with 3.5G, and 4G is not yet approved for use (still conflicting with broadcast TV signals I believe ).

 

Thank you to all of the regular posters in this thread. You've swayed me out of my Thinkpad comfort zone, and I'm very happy with my U904.

I am having a problem with the dock, though. I can't get the DisplayPort to pass audio. FWIW, HDMI out of the notebook, while docked, will pass audio. Since the dock doesn't have a 3.5 jack, this really isn't acceptable. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Thanks!

 

I don't have a dock, but just a thought - USB audio on the dock?

 

Thanks for the response. That crossed my mind, and I've seen those things for as little as $4, but I wonder about having to fiddle with the settings to get the sound duties handed back and forth when docked and undocked. But aside from that, this really ought to just work. Right now I've got the speakers connected directly to the headphone jack on the notebook. It's not the worst problem in the world, but I do feel like I wasted money on the dock.
Is there a better way to get support from Fujitsu than this form?: Fujitsu: Fujitsu America - Customer Service and Support Form

 

The DJ setup I built for our dance classes has a USB sound card built in. When I set up, I connect a power cable and a USB cable to my Fujitsu P770, and it handles switching automatically. Full disclosure - since DJPower 2008 does not run under Windows 7 or 8, I have to reboot into XP for class, then back to Win8 for the rest of the time.

The soundcard is a USB device from TurtleBeach, which is no longer made. Sounds amazing - I have another one like it in my large DJ rack for use with the big sound system (Yorkville NX550 tops and LS720 sub, Mackie mixer, digital speaker management unit, AudioTechnical wireless mics).

On the other hand, there is a free application called SoundSwitch that lets you assign a hot key, and flag specific audio devices. To switch between the audio devices, you use the hot key. I use this on my desktop to switch between the speakers and USB headset.

 

Hi. I have posted a review at Ubuntu 14.04 on Fujitsu Lifestyle U904: report which may be of help. Please find below my opinion on some of the questions you raise.

It feels solid. The lid flexes a bit but i'd say it is completely acceptable.

No need of hardware configuration in my experience. See the link at the top of this post.

Not very loud, but it has a very high-tone hissing which can be somewhat disturbing.

I do not remember they getting hot. Certainly not the palmrest.

Yes it does, but some space is left between the laptop and the dock, so air should be able to circulate.

Hope this helps.

 

Yes. Please see Ubuntu 14.04 on Fujitsu Lifestyle U904: report .

 

Hello all. I was wondering if anyone using Linux on the Fujitsu Lifestyle U904 could share opinions / advices on a series of questions...

- Does anybody know how to find out the activation key to install the Windows 8.1 from the rescue CD which comes with the u904? I installed ubuntu linux on the laptop and I wanted to install the windows 8.1 copy in a virtualbox. However the activation code does not appear printed anywhere, and the vendor told me that it should have been stored in the BIOS.I booted into the BIOS and looked around, but found nothing. Any idea of how the activation key can be recovered?

- Has anyone tried to increase battery life with laptop-mode under Linux? I have read that it may help for laptops with SSD (like the model I have) but it also seems to depend on underlying hardware. Any experience with that? Is it worth activating it?

- The battery does not charge if it has more than 90% left +/-. This can be inconvenient in some occasions --- e.g., just before a long flight when one wants to have the battery completely charged. Any idea if it's possible to force the battery to start charging (again under linux)?

- Has anyone been successful at having a good overall experience with Ubuntu and the ultra-high resolution displays?


Thanks in advance!

 

One of the problems I found was using the external headset: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1328587
You can work-around that with hda-jack-retask and making pin 19 a microphone pin. This change will be in some future versions of the kernel in Ubuntu.

@mcarro: I'll respond only to questions I can (I got mine without an OS).

I generally look over the battery life with powertop, and I noticed that the biggest drain on the battery is indeed the screen. Dimming it heavily can help with battery life (I can get down to ~7.5W of power drain and still have a usable screen indoors with the laptop mostly idling and on wifi). With the screen off, laptop idles at <4W, but what use is that?

I haven't tried laptop-mode, but I'd be very happy to hear if it helps significantly.

As for battery charging, mine charges always 100%, so I assume that's an option you can set from within Windows or BIOS. I haven't actively looked for it, but that depends on the laptop itself. My previous Sony had an option to sony-laptop module to set it up, Thinkpads have their own way laptop - How can I limit battery charging to 80% capacity? - Ask Ubuntu, and people suggest looking into BIOS for an option. You can also browse through /sys and /proc filesystems to see if something is exposed by default.

As for Ubuntu 14.04 and high DPI screen, it works relatively well for me. The only problem is Firefox which I have to manually configure devPixelsPerPx option for whenever I switch from a docked screen to using standalone. Everything else that I use respects the screen scaling factor, though some programs like Emacs have to be restarted for fonts to be adjusted in size.

FWIW, I also use different text-scaling-factors which I set with gsettings: I plan to put these into udev rules to automatically activate when I dock/undock. I mostly do this because I want my window borders to be smaller when I am on higher res.

 

I had not tried -- just plugged a headset and yes, the mic does not
seem to connect. However the internal mic seems to be good enough. I
guess that if the fan is on, then it'll catch a lot of noise...

Will try to make some controlled experiment. If anyone can report,
I'd also like to hear about it.

I didn't touch anything in the BIOS (except to disable secure boot and
change the device boot order). I didn't even boot into windows -- I
wiped the hard disk and installed the rescue CD in VirtualBox.

Any idea what should I be looking for? Well, something below 'battery'
I suppose.

My biggest problem at the moment is Google Chrome:

- Its menus / location bar is ridiculously small.
- Many pages do not render properly at all.

Which text-scale option are you using? Could you please share them
(the commands themselves would be nice to have)? I am not using udev
rules (I am actually not using an external monitor), but if you could
share the rules they would surely be useful at some point.


Thanks a lot for your comments and help!

 

U/S-904 owners does the touchpad work when you have sweaty fingers? I've had a Fujitsu ultrabook b4 (not made in Japan), and the trackpad simply refused to track my fingers after I've gotten them sweaty during an intense video game. Wiping away with paper towel didn't do it, I've had to wait for the ever thin film of sweat still present on the touchpad to evaporate before it started working again...

 

This may not be the appropriate place to mention this, so if not, please let me know. I'll be happy to post it in the proper place, if there is one. It's still under warranty, in excellent condition, and has 10 gb ram + a 480 gb crucial mx500 hdd. Includes extra bottom cover feet, original box, and original ram + hdd.

 

Hi
I had this laptop for 6 months. Very light use. Always kept at home, no drops. A small crack has appeared on the left top corner of the screen. Fujitsu refuses to repair uner warranty and asked £1005 for repair!
I can't believe a cracked had appeared with the super light use this laptop has had. Anyone else had the same problem?
Could the new technology in the screen made it very fragile?
Thanks
Massi

 

Sorry, missed the request for the script to modify the text scaling factor in Ubuntu 14.04. Basically, I've got it doing

# Text-scaling factor.
dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/interface/text-scaling-factor 1.15

on top of the 1.38 display factor (amounting to 1.58 total factor), though this means that text gets enlarged, but basic window elements (titlebar, scrollbars and similar) still only use 1.38 as the factor, which is what I prefer.


However, I am not very happy with some of the functionality:
- if I am holding the laptop in the lap or on a non-flat surface, it may sometimes register an F1 keypress out of the blue (I am guessing that the entire case wraps and somehow short-circuits the F1 key, because this happens especially when I pick up the laptop)
- talking about picking up the laptop, the fact that SD card protrudes makes me accidentally press it and getting it out quite often when I am transferring data from the card
- in similar vein, touchpad will go wild from time to time and simply stop responding until I click something; sometimes, not even that helps and touchpad stops responding for a couple of minutes, so maybe it's that sweaty-hands/fingers problem someone mentioned)
- modem-manager (specific to Ubuntu 14.04) has a bug on resetting the LTE modem when coming back from suspend: it puts it into a state where it can't be brought back without restarting the entire system
- fan fires up frequently and does indeed have a wheezing high-pitched sound that's pretty annoying
- i7-4600m performance or hd4400 performance are sub-par
- keyboard is still my worse than my Vaio VGN-Z790 or a random desktop keyboard I've got (I keep having to retype my complex screen lock password when using the laptop, whereas I always get it in the first go on other keyboards): in general, I do not make many typos, but more than I usually do
- battery life is not as good as advertised (my friend's Sony Vaio Pro 13 gets 6h regularly with the standard battery, whereas I am mostly on 4-4.5h) — I do work around this using Anker AstroPro external battery (it uses the same charging 5,5/2,5mm plug, which is a nice bonus), but still not perfect

 

Just got a Win7 loaded S904 with i5-4300U, 12GB RAM and 256 GB SSD. It has the none-touch 2.560x1.440 screen (Sharp WQHD IGZO LQ133T1JW19).

I am having a hard time figuring out which resolution and DPI percentages (anything else) I shall use?
I am going to use the dock and a 27" screen at work. Don't know yet if it supports the high resolution.

What do people do in order to be able to read the screen without getting tirred eyes?

I am thinking about returning it for a FHD screen model but is that screen same quality as the WQHD screen?

 

Hey kaja,

I'm afraid that Win 7 in not really well adapted to super hi-res screens (even 8.1 strugles at times).

Moving to Win 8.1 will get you scalling of aplications and text (that apart from RDP and multi screen support at different scales works very well) and apparently Win 10 will work even better.

That said I think this kind of resolution is wasted on this form factor (and for what I do with mine)

I bought the S904 for the battery life, weight, and ports, could do without the screen.

 

Hi kaja,

I have with U904 with the 3200x1800 resolution so I probably could pull it off at my resolution setting => I had it set to 1600x900.
I specifically looked for one with a multiple of 900 instead of 720 because I figured I could live with 14" at 900 instead of 720.
My disadvantage is that for most movies at 720p things would be smaller or stretched if I'm paying attention but I didn't mind the sacrifice as the machine was meant for work. [and 900 is obviously not enough to watch 1080p unless I switch it back to 1800 again]

The 1080 resolution at 14" is very acceptable too...except that I understand it isn't the IGZO superior screen. [Do check again as I haven't verified it and am running off my memory]

I aim to only use the laptop screen when travelling as I have it set up to dual monitors at my office.

 

Hello everyone
I have tried to upgrade ssd hard drive in my U904 (from 256gb) to 512gb.
However, I encountered two problems

1. Most important
I cannot detach my U904 laptop back cover after removing all the screws.
Seems like there are two glued? areas which are holding it near the screen side (I removed that screws as well)
Does anyone has a solution or could post some detailed pictures? Maybe Im doing something wrong?

2. Operating system issue
I want to use whole available disk space on new drive thats why i wanted to download os iso image from microsoft site,however that is not possible. The oem bios product key does not work.


Every suggestion is highly appreciated
Best Regards
Jan

 

http://www.3dnews.ru/assets/external/illustrations/2014/03/28/814659/bottom.jpg

To my knowledge there should not be anything special keeping the bottom cover in place. I count 6 visible screws, I don't know if there is more under the feet.

If you can open it from the opposite end a little bit, then you might see with a flashlight if there actually is some two-sided tape or similar keeping it together.

 

Yes, there are screws under the front feet beside the 6 you mention (eg. all the circular rubber covers hide screws: circular "foot" in the middle does not hide any screws).

 

Jan - use something like Acronis MigrateEasy to move everything from your old drive to your new drive.

Works very well! I have done this with systems up to Windows 8.1.