Digital Home Thoughts: Stunning Mobility and Battery Life with the Fujitsu P5010D

Did You Hear That? Probably Not
As you might imagine, audio output from such a small laptop is sadly lacking. The speakers produce tinny, quiet audio. Even when cranked to full volume, the speakers never approach what you’d consider to be “loud”. This, sadly, makes them ill-equipped to drive audio for a DVD. If you’re the only one watching, this problem is easily solved with headphones, but in some scenario's that's just not practical. I wasn't expecting excellent sound, but I was expecting it to be louder.


Figure 2: The P5010D makes a great DVD player...as long as you can sit close. With a 10.6" screen, it's like watching movies on a very small screen TV - although the wide screen certainly helps a great deal with 16:9 ratio DVDs..

However, on the plus side, the internal audio chipset does an excellent job – I connected the P5010D’s headphone jack to a small SONY stereo system while watching a DVD, and the audio quality was excellent. You could use this to drive a bigger sound system as well, because the headphone jack doubles as an SPDIF optical out, which is something I didn't know until I read the manual. Definitely not something I was expecting! I was able to purchase a 3.5mm male to twin RCA left/right female jack adaptor, although I had to go to three different stores in the small town of Sundre, Alberta, until I found the right one (Radio Shack – you rule!). Once connected to the Sony stereo system, the sound quality was excellent.

All Isn't Perfect
I only have a few true “gotchas” for this laptop – the SpeedStep implementation is somehow flawed. When plugged into AC power, I was unable to get the CPU to go the full 900 Mhz – Windows would always report it as 600 Mhz. I went into the BIOS and changed the setting to be “Maximum performance” when on both battery and AC power, yet still Windows reported the speed as only 600 Mhz. I tried disabling SpeedStep in the BIOS, which you’d think would mean it would run at the full 900 Mhz constantly, but again I was stuck at the 600 Mhz barrier. It wasn’t until I downloaded a program called Speedswitch XP that I was able to control my CPU and set it to run at 900 Mhz. I’m not sure why I had to do this, but no end user should have to do so. The laptop should always run at 900 Mhz when on AC power, and 600 Mhz when on battery power. Speedswitch does allow me to do one very useful thing: I can force the CPU to go to 900 Mhz when on battery power, perfect for those intensive games. This is something Windows should allow you to do anyway – I’ve never understood why there isn’t a SpeedStep item in the control panel to allow the user to configure the settings.

Another thing that I found quite frustrating is how slow the integrated media card slots are. You'd think that being integrated directly onto the motherboard would mean the fastest speed possible, but Fujitsu screwed this up – badly. How bad is it? Well, I was testing a Kingston 4 GB CompactFlash card, and using a Sandisk 8 in 1 reader connected to the USB 2.0 port, the 4 GB card clocked 6552 KB/s for 1 MB reads, and 6040 KB/s for 1 MB writes. The same 4 GB card in the CompactFlash port clocked a pathetic 1330 KB/s for 1 MB reads and exactly 1330 KB/s for 1 MB writes – meaning this is a hard limitation of the port. The SD slot is just as bad, making using the slots an exercise in patience.

The 3D performance of this laptop is abysmal, but that shouldn't come as a big surprise. I've been able to play Warcraft III by turning down the quality to as low as possible, but this laptop is definitely not designed to play 3D games. It would be nice for Fujitsu to integrate something a bit more capable, but this is not a gaming laptop in any way.