Fujitsu Siemens D1845 Review

Overall Rating

High screen quality
Dual layer DVD writer (+/-)
Built-in wireless technology
Overall, a very powerful machine
80GB hard drive, which is very silent (but also rather slow (4200rpm, 12ms, 2MB buffer, ATA 100))

Battery lifetime (about 1.5 hours)
Tends to get very hot
Very fragile casing
Only packs 512MB Ram (be careful as there are 2 modules of 256MB each, divided over the two available slots)

I bought the Fujitsu Siemens D1845 laptop about half a year ago (Medio 2005). At first sight it was a great machine, with a very powerful processor (3.4Ghz P4 Mobile), a nice graphics card (ATI Mobility Radeon 9600/9700 with 128Mb on-board RAM), a large capacity hard drive (see above). It is a wonderful machine for watching DVD's due to its very nice and clear screen. It also has good connectivity due to its built-in wireless internet receiver, and 3 USB 2.0 and 1 Firewire 400 port. It is a great machine for playing top of the shelf games etc...

But, very soon I started noticing that after a few hours of intensive use, this computer tended to get very hot. It reached temperature levels so high that I experienced several overheating related crashes/hangs. Also, the computers casing feels very fragile, and the plastic seems to be very thin (maybe Fujitsu-Siemens intentionally designed it that way because of heat dissipating issues, but that's just a wild guess). Now, these hangs and crashes kept occurring frequently. To cope with these overheating problems, about 1.5 months ago I purchased the Antec Notebook Cooler (see my review on that), which worked very well (overall temperature dropped by about 10 C), but apparently I was too late; my hard drive went dead on me a few weeks ago. Probably due to overheating.

To conclude:
It is a nice looking and powerful machine with many possibilities, but it also comes with a serious overheating problem. So, if you are considering buying this machine for intensive use, you might reconsider, taking in mind the above. If you decide to buy it, or already own one and are experiencing the same overheating problems, I strongly advise you to invest in a notebook cooler.