Refurbished Fujitsu LifeBook N3530 Review

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Introduction

The Fujitsu LifeBook N3530 is a 15.4” notebook that can be considered a desktop replacement due to its above average weight. Fujitsu is known for its above-average build quality and beautiful glossy screens. Considering that I bought this notebook as refurbished, it may even be classified as a budget notebook. We will explore these aspects further in this review.

Specs for Fujitsu N3530 as reviewed:

• Intel Core Duo T2300 (1.66GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 667MHz FSB)
• Windows Media Center Edition 2005
• Memory: 1536MB DDR2 667MHz SDRAM (1x512MB included + 1x1024MB extra)
• Display: 15.4&quot; WXGA Widescreen CrystalView (glossy) display 1200x800 native resolution, 500:1 contrast ratio, 300 nits
• Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 with 128MB Hypermemory
• Hard Drive: 80GB Fujitsu HDD (Serial ATA, 5400rpm)
• Optical drive: Dual Layer Multiformat DVD Writer
• Connectivity: Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (Tri-mode 802.11a/b/g), V.90 56K Modem, Gigabit LAN
• Ports: 4 USB 2.0, 1 Firewire, 1 S-Video out, 1 VGA
• Slots: 1 PCMCIA slot, 1 ExpressCard (54mm/34mm), 1 MutiMedia Card (MS, MS Pro, SD, xD)
• Lithium Ion Battery (9 Cell, 10.8V, 7200mAh)
• Dimensions: 14.25&quot; x 10.51&quot; x 1.57&quot; (W x H x D)
• Weight: 7.92 lbs
• 90-day Limited Warranty for Refurbished Notebooks

Reasons for Buying

My old, not-so-reliable Clevo had died on me (the Pentium 4 is the cpu devil!), so I was looking for a reasonably priced notebook to tide me over before getting another notebook for medical school (hopefully). I wanted something that was reasonably powerful (Core Duo, 1 GB ram, 5400 rpm HD), well-built, decent-looking, and not mainstream (I hate having what everyone else has). I also wanted a dedicated video card, just in case the desire to game struck me. Since I knew that finding something with a Core Duo and a video card with good build quality would be difficult to find at a good price on stores, I resorted to shopping on eBay. For more information on buying and selling on Ebay, check out my Guide to Avoiding Scams on eBay.

I was looking at the following models before I chose the N3530: Sony VAIO FE, Sony VAIO SZ, HP nc8430, and the HP nx9420. I couldn’t find either Sony model, new or used, for a price I wanted. Originally, I purchased a refurbished HP nx9420, for $1,300 because it was quite a deal for its price. However, there was a shipping problem, and I never received the notebook. I did receive my money back, thankfully. At that point, I realized that I probably shouldn’t spend that much for a notebook anyway and capped my max budget to $1,000.

Where and How Purchased

In my search, I found the seller Fujitsu_Computer_Store. It was actually an eBay store that was run by Fujitsu where they sold their excess new and refurbished products in auction style listings. I was able to get the system with a dual core processor, x1400 video card, 1.5 GB (1GB was added aftermarket), 80 GB HD, and good build quality for under $1000. To me, that was quite a bargain. Unfortunately, refurbished notebooks only come with 90-day warranty.

Build and Design

Since the moment I laid eyes on this notebook, I have marveled at its simplistic yet elegant design. The matte black and grey suit each other well.

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I also like the led lights that they have for the power button and battery indicators.

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However, because it is a refurbished computer, it did have a few cosmetic blemishes. Mainly, there are some light scratches on the left side of the keyboard that looks almost small specs of dust. Most of the time, it is unnoticeable, unless I make an effort to find it.

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The other problem is a bit more visible. There are some shiny spots on the keyboard keys due to wear. Also, part of the space bar, the alt key, the Windows key, and the function key are slightly higher than the rest of the keyboard.

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As for the build quality itself, the notebook is quite solid. There is no noticeable flex on most of the chassis. Nevertheless, the chassis has “weak” spots around where the LCD meets the body. But even the flex there is no where near the flex I have felt on Gateways and Compaqs I have played around with at Office Depot. With normal pressure, there are no ripples on the LCD, though with slightly above average pressure, you can produce ripples on the upper-right hand corner. Regarding the hinges, they are quite stiff, though if I shake the notebook a little, there is a small amount of wobbling of the LCD. The only real problem that I have with the build quality is that, although nothing seems to be moving, the chassis and hinges creak.

If you look at the bottom of the notebook, you find the RAM compartment where the Windows product code is found. The area covered by the felt is where the HD is. The battery does not attach to the back of the notebook like some batteries do. Instead, it is found on bottom of the notebook on the upper right corner. That small piece of plastic at the upper edge of the bottom held in place by two silver screws is where the built-in tv tuner would be if you purchased that option.

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Screen

Admittedly, I am not a screen buff. I don’t know what makes a screen “incredible”. However, in my humble opinion, I find the screen to be quite nice. The WXGA resolution may be a bit big for some, but for me it was just right. When you go to battery power, the notebook automatically reduces down to two notches of brightness, and even at lowest brightness, the screen is still readable. Below is an image of the screen on the lowest brightness setting.

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When I compared the screen with my matte 19” acer lcd with the same brightness and a higher contrast ratio, I could see the difference in quality. The white looked whiter to me, and even text seemed slightly crisper on the N3530. Also, the Fujitsu screen seemed to be able to detect the light blue background for the most popular laptop poll and the laptop search box, while my desktop monitor doesn’t.

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This notebook also has good horizontal and vertical viewing angles. Though there is darkening and lightening, the screen is viewable even at extreme angles. The images make the darkening and lightening more extreme than they actually are.

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It is worth mentioning that there is negligible light leakage on the bottom of the notebook. I had trouble capturing it with my camera, so I apologize for not posting a picture.

Speakers

Again, I am no audio aficionado, so I don’t know how valid my opinion is. The audio is definitely a step up from my old Clevo, from which I could barely hear anything at the highest volume setting. I like the fact that it has a lot of notches for the volume, so that you can have more variety in your volume settings. However, the highest volume setting is lower than I would expect it to be. Also, as the other N3530 reviewer, mach_zero, aptly noted, the placing of the speakers is both good and bad. If you are not typing and listening to something, the speakers will be slightly louder because they are close to you. Unfortunately, while typing, the sound is often muffled. Anyway, I would recommend headphones/earphones for any notebook owner.

Performance and Benchmarks

This system is noticeably snappier than my old notebook (2.0 ghz Pentium 4, 40 GB 4200rpm HD, 512 MB ram). The time it takes to get from pressing power to the password screen in Windows is about 37 seconds. When I opened pdf files on my old computer, it would take forever to open, and sometimes it would crash Adobe. Now, with the N3530, pdfs load faster, and Adobe has yet to stall on me.

SuperPi Comparison

SuperPi measures CPU performance by calculating Pi to a specific number of digits.

Notebook	Time to Calculate Pi to 2 Million Digits
Fujitsu LifeBook N3530 (1.66GHz Core Duo)	1m 24s
HP dv6000z (1.8GHz Turion64 X2 TL-56)	1m 54s
Compaq V3000T(1.6GHz Core Duo)	1m 26s
Dell Inspiron e1505 (2.00 GHz Core 2 Duo)	1m 02s
Toshiba A100(2.0GHz Core Duo)	1m 18s
Acer Aspire 5102WLMi(1.6GHz Turion64 X2 TL-50	2m 22s
Gateway E-100M(1.2GHz Core Solo ULV)	2m 02s
Dell Inspiron 600m (1.6 GHz Dothan Pentium M)	2m 10s
HP dv5000z(2.0GHz Sempron 3300+)	2m 02s

HDTune Benchmark Results (80GB 5400 RPM Fujitsu drive)

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3DMark06

I was curious about how different drivers would affect the 3DMark05 scores. The stock drivers were the ATI Catalyst 6.5 drivers. When I updated to the 6.10 drivers, there was a slight increase in marks. The newest Omega drivers yield a tad more marks than the 6.10 Catalyst drivers. I wanted to check out something less main stream, so I also tried out the DHzeropoint drivers. Astonishingly, even though they are based on the 6.9 Catalyst drivers like the Omegas, they yielded almost 250 marks less than the stock driver! Suffice to say, that’s probably why they are not as well-known as Omega drivers.

From Left to Right, stock drivers (Catalyst 6.5), Catalyst 6.10, Latest Omega drivers, Latest DHzeropoint drivers.

3DMark05 Comparison Results:

Notebook	3D Mark 05 Results
Fujitsu LifeBook N3530 (1.66GHz Core Duo, ATI X1400 128MB)	1,758 3D Marks
Dell Inspiron e1705 (2.0GHz Core Duo, ATI X1400 128MB)	1,791 3D Marks
Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi (2.0GHz Core Duo, ATI X1600 256MB)	4,236 3DMarks
Lenovo ThinkPad T60 (2.0GHz Core Duo, ATI X1400 128MB)	2,092 3D Marks
Asus V6Va (2.13 GHz Pentium M, ATI x700 128 MB)	2,530 3D Marks
Fujitsu n6410 (1.66 GHz Core Duo, ATI X1400 128MB)	2,273 3DMarks
HP Pavilion dv4000 (1.86 GHz Pentium M, ATI X700 128MB)	2,536 3D Marks
Dell XPS M1210 (2.16 GHz Core Duo, nVidia Go 7400 256MB)	2,090 3D Marks

As for actual gaming, the only game that was played on this machine was Knights of the Old Republic II. It is a fairly old game, so I was somewhat disappointed that I could not play it on native resolution with all the settings maxed. Even at the next highest resolution (600x800), I could not play with all the eye candy without the game play becoming choppy. Granted at the setting it was on (no AA, no AF, high texture, no soft shadow), it ran smoothly and still looked pretty decent.

Heat and Noise

The cooling design of this notebook is very different from my old notebook. It has no fans or vents on the bottom. On the left side, there is a small vent, with a larger vent at the back. One plus of this cooling design is that the entire notebook is the same height, instead of other notebooks that are higher on the back end to promote air flow. This gives the notebook a slimmer feel, though in actuality, it is fairly thick.

With normal use, the CPU temperatures (in Celsius) are around the mid 50s. The highest the CPU temperature has reached was 66°C after performing multiple 3DMark05 tests. The HD temperatures have yet to exceed 45°C. As for the heat that you actually feel, the keyboard and palmrest areas never get warmer than the feeling of warm breath on your hand. Conversely, the bottom of the notebook is always pretty warm, even on low load. This does not mean that it is hot (definitely not too hot to touch), but it will make your lap sweat as if you had a heating pad on your lap. If you are like me and use your laptop on your lap all the time, you may want to invest in some sort of cooling pad. I use the iLap to keep the heat off of my legs. The cooling system seems to be designed to keep the heat from getting to the keyboard area by dissipating the heat through the bottom of the notebook.

The noise produced by this notebook may be a problem for some. I use my notebook while watching television, and sometimes I can hear the fans over the volume of the television when they go into high gear. Also, when I use the optical drive, the spinning gives off a noisy whir and causes the notebook to vibrate. I wouldn’t recommend using this notebook in quiet areas like libraries or in classes.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The most disappointing aspect of this notebook would be the keyboard and touchpad. The keyboard is not the most comfortable to type on. The key stroke seems deeper to me compared to the Latitude D600 keyboard I have been using. Moreover, the keys seem to give a bit of positive feedback when you type, so every once in awhile, you think you typed in something but the keystroke doesn’t register. Another flaw is that the keys are very “clicky-clacky”, so again, can be noisy for quiet areas. Nevertheless, the keyboard has one plus. There is negligible flex on the keyboard that in no way affects your typing. Even with its shortcomings, you eventually get used to typing on it.

The touchpad is also lacking. The touchpad and the buttons feel too small. Considering how wide the notebook is, it would have been nicer to have a wider touchpad. When I first started using this notebook, I missed the touchpad buttons because I was expecting them to be wider as well. Like the keyboard keys, the touchpad buttons are loud. However, the farther you move from the rocker switch scrolling button in the middle, the less noisy the buttons become. I would have liked less resistance for the touchpad and scroll buttons.

The N3530 comes with a few buttons and switches to enrich your computing experience. To the right of the keyboard you have the media buttons/application panels. You use the mode button to switch between the application panel and the media player buttons. While the application panel is fairly useful, I have yet to figure out how to work the media panels. On the upper right hand corner, there is a rocker switch to control the volume. Finally, to the left of the power button is a switch to turn off/on the wifi for saving battery.

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Input and Output Ports

Port placement is one of the positives of this notebook. It has 4 USB ports, but one of the ports is on the left side. This makes it convenient for plugging in USB drives or other USB devices that you insert and remove often. Also, there are no ports on the right side, making things less crowded for using an external mouse (if you’re right-handed anyway). I also like how the headphone ports are on the left side instead of the front, because it would stick into my stomach when using the notebook on my lap. One thing that makes the n3530 rather unique is that it has both a pcmcia slot and an express slot. Most notebooks have one or the other. This computer has pretty much every port I need (e.g. firewire, memory card, s-video). Some may be unhappy that it lacks a DVI port, though it is of no consequence to me.

Left side view of N3530 (view large image)

Right side view of N3530 (view large image)

Front side view of N3530 (view large image)

Back view of N3530 (view large image)

Wireless

The first time I booted this notebook, I had a problem connecting to my wireless network. Ever since that first reboot, I have not had a problem. I get excellent signal strength throughout my apartment that has lead paint on the walls.

Battery

Since I only use my notebook at home, battery life is not very important to me. For the review’s sake, I tested the battery out. While writing this review, using the internet, doing minor photo editing, and having the brightness at two notches, I got a little less than 2 hours. Because this is a used notebook, the battery has some wear on it. I have only been using this notebook for about two months, and it already has 37% wear! This notebook has only been available for less than a year, so this amount of battery wear is rather high.

Operating System and Software

This notebook comes with Windows Media Center. For me it is not much different for my everyday uses than XP Home or XP Pro, since I don’t really use this notebook as a Media Center. To be honest, I don’t remember all the original software that this notebook came with. I just remember that it wasn’t all that much. They kept the junky software to a minimum. I did uninstall Norton Anti-virus. Some pre-installed software that I still have include the Application Panel software, the Fujitsu driver update software, Cyberlink, and Roxio. The discs that came with the notebook are the recovery utility disc, drivers and applications restore disc, Microsoft Works 8, and a disc with Roxio and Cyberlink software.

Customer Support

I have run into two problems with this notebook during my ownership. When I first received the notebook, the notebook would not charge. I called Fujitsu customer service and got connected to a rep within a few minutes. Although the rep put me on hold a few times, I eventually got a new AC adapter shipped to me with 2-day delivery.

The other problem was the battery wear I mentioned above. I called them at around 12:30 am. To my surprise, their customer support line was actually available. I explained the problem I had with the battery wear, and they promptly set up a new battery to be sent to me.

My experience with Fujitsu’s customer service has been extremely positive. I figured that since my notebook was a refurb, they might treat me as a lesser customer, but that certainly wasn’t the case. They were very responsive to my problems. Though I haven’t gotten my keyboard bend fixed, I have discussed it with the support rep. Because I expressed hesitation about having to pay for shipping, they gave me the number and address of an authorized service center in Chicago where I could just drop off my notebook to be fixed. I was really impressed that they bothered to do this for me. What excellent support!

Conclusion

The N3530 has its pros and its cons, but overall, I love owning this notebook. If I had to do it again, I would definitely buy a refurbished notebook off of eBay if the price was right. For under $1,000, a refurbished N3530 is well-worth the money. However, I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who travels often, needing something light-weight with good battery life. Also, for people who need to use a notebook in quiet environments this notebook would not be ideal.

Pros:

• Elegant design
• Good build quality
• Nice screen
• Smart port placement
• Both PCMCIA and Express Card slot
• Not a lot of pre-loaded software
• Wonderful customer support
• Excellent value from buying refurbished item on eBay

Cons:

• Creaky chassis and hinges
• Always warm (sometimes very warm) on the bottom
• Somewhat noisy fans, optical drive, keyboard, and touchpad
• Subpar keyboard and touchpad (needs to be wider)
• Slightly below average battery life
• Minor cosmetic defects due to refurbished condition
• Only 90-day warranty
• Heavier than average 15.4” notebook

 

Good review! For under $1000, this is a steal. Did you try playing other (newer) games? I am interested in knowing how they run.

 

That's kind of interesting Fujitsu operates on eBay there with its store instead of from its own website for refurbs -- or maybe they do both. I have to say that is very cool that tech support took care of you for the battery issue on this purchase, and refreshing to hear a good story.

Those viewing angles are very good, the one thing I was quite dissapointed with on the LifeBook A6010 (which is a lot like the N3530 but not marketed as being the multimedia high-end offering the N series is) was that the viewing angles were poor -- still had a very nice glossy screen though.

Bummer on the keyboard bend, but for the price you got I guess you can accept a couple of minor defects. Overall I love Fujitsu, I wish they'd make their S6000 series again for the U.S., I used that once upon a time and liked it a lot.

 

Yep Yep, I love my Fujitsu too, I will be looking at the N6000 series or equivalent when I am ready to purchase a laptop again, I hope they can drop the weight just a little bit of the N series models eventually, maybe use more exotic materials or something, Dry Carbon fiber casing with titanium chassis? haha maybe

As long as the screens keep being some of the best.

 

if there is a demo of a specific game you are looking for, i could test that out for you. i don't really play games....and kotor2 was played by my fiancee, not me, so i don't really have anything recent.

they said that i could stop by the authorized repair center in chicago, and that they could replace my keyboard on the spot. now the only question is if the center is opened on saturday, and if i can find parking in downtown chicago.....

 

Thanks for an excellent and unbiased review, along with a helpful discussion on the pros and cons of refurb computers

 

300 nits is as bright as a desktop lcd screen

a very bright one.

 

the desktop monitor i did the comparison with actually has a brightness of 300 nits as well, but for some reason, the fujitsu screen seems brighter.

 

Does anyone know how to replace the hard drive in one of these N3530's?
Or know a link to a tutorial?
Thanks,
sh