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10729287today at 2:06 PM5 repliesview on HN

The two made-in-Japan, premium grade, Fujitsu laptops I had to work with were by far the worse pieces of electronic I have ever used. Both exhibited identical defects: fans running continuously at maximum speed, and the batteries would completely die within hours of the devices being powered off. Windows or Linux. And don't talk about that tiny unresponsive trackpad to me. Never again.


Replies

dijittoday at 2:11 PM

The Fujitsu Lifebooks were legendary for their robustness back in the day, I'm genuinely sad you had that experience.

The only fujitsu laptops I used was back in 2011- it was a budget version for on-call and it was fine..

Sounds like the fans running 100% probably contributed significantly to the issue here. If I had to guess it was likely that the C-States were disabled in BIOS somehow so the CPU clock was running at full tilt the whole time, maybe combined with a bad thermal paste job.

I'm not here to defend Fujitsu but I've had really bad experiences with basically every major laptop brand (Dell: majorly bad coil whine and especially faulty soldered RAM, HP: keys vanishing from the keyboard and very weak hinges that break all the time, Apple: The GPU unsoldering itself and the butterfly keyboard shenanigans).

I don't really know any brand with a flawless track record sadly.

Before anyone brings up Thinkpads, they're trading on a reputation that hasn't been true for over a decade. If you have fond memories of a thinkpad it's most likely that you had it from before 2016, or it's "fine", but certainly not great.

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dwrobertstoday at 2:22 PM

Their consumer electronics arm is completely unrelated and also majority owned by Lenovo

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_trampeltiertoday at 3:46 PM

I just have Fujitsu Lifebooks at Home since 2007. I think they are good, came with a bloat free Windows. I bought even one for my Mom over 10 years ago. I just changed once the HDD with a SSD. Now all my Lifebook run with Linux just flawless.

WillAdamstoday at 2:34 PM

Reaching further back, the Sylistic line was mostly quite good/durable, and I still use my Stylstic ST-4110 when I need to use an old scanner or control a CNC machine on my back deck when cutting tropical hardwoods.

Really miss the transflective display and wish that there were newer devices with such technology

anonzzziestoday at 3:32 PM

What year? The ones I had were the best. Very expensive, but service at the office & at home, very sturdy, very long battery life. That was somewhere early 2000s.

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