Fujitsu-Siemens AMILO Pa 2548 review

I recently bought a Fujitsu-Siemens AMILO Pa 2548 so I thought I'd contribute my opinion on the product.

I have the 14P version which has the 2.2 GHz AMD Turion processor but I imagine other versions will not be so different.

First, you do get a lot of computer for the price and there seems to be lots of good internet deals around.

Overall, it's a nice machine with a good finish and a raft of nice features. You take it out of the box, switch it on and off it goes after some initial automatic Vista setup processing. No printed manual, just a quick start guide but there's a PDF guide on the harddrive.

Everything seem quicker than my old Celeron notebook and I have no complaints on performance.

Other reviews have commented on how bad the inbuilt speakers are and I utterly agree. Infact it's hard to appreciate just how bad they are until you hear some music coming through them. Think of listening through a tin can tied to a piece of string.

The screen is pretty good so no complaints there but the keyboard worried me slightly. I found the full stop (period) key had a problem where maybe 50% of the time during fast typing it didn't register the keystroke. If you jabbed it, it would be OK but it definately has a problem with being less sensitive than the rest. I thought about sending it back but I don't think a test in the factory could have shown up the problem and I'm not sure the distributor would agree with my assessment so I let it go. (I also mapped the seldom used application key beneath it to also be the full stop).

Fan-wise, its quiet but there's quite a bit of heat coming out of the side, bottom and even the top. I doubt its really suitable for opening up on your lap for any length of time but then it's a portable desktop replacement for me. Battery life is anyway limited to just over 2 hours.

Vista is vista but an XP downgrade would have been nice. You really wonder why Microsoft bothered but I guess they had to do something new and 'improved' with all that cash but unfortunately Vista is really a waste of time and if anything, makes life harder as you try to figure out where all the good XP stuff has gone. XP also seems more reliable since I've seen Vista do a few strange things.

Would I buy an Amilo next time around? Yes, I'd certainly look at it. It's a highly specified, well built machine for a good price however I would tend next time to buy from a local shop where I could go if I found a fault such as the key problem I mentioned. There are always risks with Internet buying and possibly extra costs if things go wrong.

 

There were a couple of things I forgot to mention in my review. The most important is what I'm using the computer for. I'm not a gamer so I can't comment on that although my understanding is that this is not designed to be a gaming machine.

What I do do is a lot of is web surfing and video watching and it is perfect for this. I also do some java programming and the computer compiles code in a flash. Lastly, I am doing some university studies in finance and have iinstalled Sun's free OpenOffice for my word processing and excel work. OpenOffice is written in Java and can be slow but it performs really well on the Amilo so I think this machine would be a good choice for a student who is doing everything but gaming.

I'm not using the built in web-cam yet but it strikes me as a handy thing to have if I move on to IP telephony later. I tried it out and although a little grainy, it seems to do the job.

Although this machine doesn't have a gigabit ethernet port (and why should it - many dedicated firewalls don't have it), it does have an old fashioned 55Kb inbuilt telephone modem which I think is extremely useful when on the move and away from any kind of broadband.

I saw a review that complained about the nag screen that tells you to create some DVD-R backup disks but that strikes me as good thing.

I notice that Vista needs well over 30 Gigabytes of disk and uses 33% of my 2GBytes of RAM at minimum so I would recommend getting a notebook version with lots of disk and not less than 2Gbytes RAM. There also seemed to be endless updates coming from the windows update servers after initial startup (I think I have had at least 40 installed). Strangely when I wanted to reinstall Media Player (it wasn't working properly with FireFox), the installer said I had a later version than the one on microsoft.com so I couldn't do it!