Fujitsu P7230 and Windows 8 experiences

I upgraded my nieces P7230 yesterday to Windows 8. This laptop has got a U7600 core 2 duo processor, intel 945GMS. Intel 5300 card, dvd supermulti, 2GB of ram and a 128GB V4 Photofast G-Monster 1.8 50 pin IDE SSD. I thought i would start a thread on this to note my experiences. It all has gone fine. She uses her iPad more these days, but i thought i would do this upgrade anyway whilst i had the laptop at home with me. I'm also thinking of upgrading one of my laptops to W8 so it was helpful for me also.

I did an upgrade from Windows 7 32bit to Windows 8 32bit and the few things that were not working i could just download again. The wwan is working fine, i just had to download the W7 drivers again.

It is pretty fast, but just took me a little while to get used to some of the changes. I like it though. As expected of course boot times has been improved over W7 and that was an already vast improvement over the Vista software it came with. It boots in 26s from pressing the power on button to the start homepage. W7 was at least around 35 seconds. I couldn't get the fingerprint reader to work as it should in W7 so i'm not even going to attempt to try and get it working now.
This laptop uses logitech software for the webcam and i just downloaded the Vista drivers for that again from the UK website. There are two different webcams it seems that was used for EU models. I swapped the webcam over a few years ago to one that was used in a later UK model. This is a pink/white version and i think that laptop came with a Ricoh webcam.
This laptop has a 1280x800 display and it is fine, although the minimium recommended resolution for W8 is 1366x768.

Fan noise seems to be no worse compared with W7 and if anything to my ears it seems to be a little bit improved-possibly because of the lower cpu utilisation. The Echo software is working fine. I've not really checked battery life and i'm not sure how well used the battery was when i got it to really provide any information on that. At 5/8 brightness though in W8's balanced mode with BT off, wwan on and connected with wifi off it shows 6hrs30 mins+ (7.06hrs exactly) hours pretty much idle with the standard battery and graphics in power mode and using Fujitsu's power echo saver mode with all the power saving features set to turn off. This kind of battery life is more than good enough for the intended purposes. With the internal battery it will of course add more runtime.

I think that this is a decent upgrade for those especially looking to get as much performance possible out of a 4-5+ year old ULV laptop.

 

thanks for that Rachel, good to see the P series still running!

I've done a test install of Win8 on my P7120, running surprisingly well! Im using older hardware though and finding audio and video drivers not working or defaulting to generic ones. Battery life is also about 4 hours though i beleive that is more a case of my battery being 6+ years old now.

On the finger print side, Win8 was able to identify and install the drivers for the fingerprint reading automatically.

Also my boot times seem faster and im not on a SSD, i get about 15 seconds to password page and then 5 seconds to start menu. I dont have any additional software installed though.