Fujitsu Lifebook E743 Review

Fujitsu Lifebook E743 Review

Welcome to a Laptop Battery specialist of the Fujitsu Laptop Battery

When corporate bosses go PC shopping for their road warriors, they need to know: Are the laptops light and easy to carry? Are they comfortable to use? Can employees hook up all the stuff they need during trips and back in the office? Do the systems offer good security options? Finally, can they take the thumps and bumps of hard traveling? All these issues affect productivity and the cost of both initial hardware purchase and upkeep, bottom-line concerns for any company.

Juggling the above goals, Fujitsu achieves mixed success with its latest Lifebook. The highlight: The Lifebook E743 is about as expandable as a compact laptop with a 14-inch display can get. The notebook bristles with ports and slots, and it also has an innovative expansion bay that lets you pop in a second battery pack with battery such as Fujitsu LifeBook NH570 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP175AP Battery, Fujitsu Celsius H250 Battery, Fujitsu Celsius H700 Battery, Fujitsu Celsius H920 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook A6230 Battery, Fujitsu FMVNBP215 Battery, Fujitsu FMVNBP216 Battery, Fujitsu FPB0272 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP335 Battery, Fujitsu FPCBP334 Battery, Fujitsu LifeBook LH532 Battery, an optical drive, or even a mini projector. The Lifebook also comes with plenty of security-centric and office-integration features, including a fingerprint scanner, a Smart Card reader, and an underside connector for locking the machine onto a docking station or port replicator.

At first blush, we quite liked this Lifebook. Pulling it out of its shipping box, we could hold it securely by its spine, because the notebook tapers down from 1.3 inches thick at the hinge to just 0.9 inch at the front edge. It's quietly stylish, with a burnished magnesium top and a thin red stripe that runs along the front edge with a jaunty little flare at one end.

Under the lid, the keyboard deck is attractive aluminum. The front edges of the screen and keyboard are beveled inward, making it easy to grip and flip up the screen and get down to work. The hinge is well tensioned, letting you easily position the panel but keep it tilted at the right viewing angle.

This Lifebook comes with just the main battery installed. That 5,800mAh lithium-ion pack held on for five hours and change in our rundown test, which is certainly okay, but nothing to tweet your colleagues about...

Fujitsu didn't send us the secondary bay battery for formal testing. The option to install this secondary battery, though, takes some of the sting out of the fact that you can't yet get this machine with any of Intel's 4th-Generation/"Haswell" mobile CPUs inside. So far, in the Haswell-based laptops we have tested, Haswell and good battery life have run hand-in-hand.

To sum up, it's hard to beat the Fujitsu Lifebook E743 if you want to graft a raft of peripherals onto your notebook. But you may chafe at the clunky keyboard and touch pad, and we found ourselves thinking about fit-and-finish and construction sturdiness rather than taking those things for granted as we do with many laptops.

If it's going to spend more time in the office than on the road, and you can plug in an external keyboard and mouse, then this Lifebook isn't a bad deal. But if you travel a lot, check out similar 14-inch slimlines from other vendors, and be sure to try them out to get a good feel for their keyboards, touch pads, and screens. Whether you help run a Fortune 500 company or a 15-person office, you want your people out there being the best earners they can be.