Being a Centrino laptop, the Li 1718 comes with an 802.11b,g Wi-Fi adaptor as standard. It's no problem to hop on to a local hotspot and go online. It also has a 56Kbps modem, which is great if your broadband conks out, or if you just like keeping it old-skool. There's no Bluetooth, though, so you'll need to synchronise your mobile phone data via USB.
Software includes Windows Vista Home Premium edition, Microsoft Works, Nero 7 Essentials S and Symantec Norton Internet Security Suite 2007. Handily, 12GB of disk space has been reserved for system recovery, so if it all goes pear-shaped you can re-install the software and OS without much hassle.
Performance
The Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li 1718's
performance is a mixed bag. Its CPU is a dual-core model that runs at a
decent lick, and it has plenty of memory, so it'll cope with most tasks
you throw at it. It certainly ran without much fuss during our time
with it -- happily coping with several applications at once. It scored
1,862 in PCMark 2005, which is roughly the same as the Mesh MSI M670-S2.
But then it all falls down where the graphics are concerned -- it runs full-screen video at an absolutely unwatchable frame rate, which is unforgivable. It scored 170 in 3DMark 2006.
Battery life wasn't particularly special either. It lasted 90 minutes in our BatteryEater test, and about 2 hours when doing simple tasks like editing a Word document. It's about par for the course in this sort of laptop, so we wouldn't recommend straying too far from a mains outlet.
Conclusion
The Li 1718 is good value for money. It's
better equipped than anything we've seen in its price group, and is
only let down by its inability to handle graphics. But if watching
movies isn't a requirement then it'll serve you just fine. Pop down to
Tesco post haste and pick one up with your weekly groceries.
Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Nick Hide
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