Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li 1718 review: Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li 1718

The Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li 1718 is aimed at those who can't afford to splash out on the latest big-name laptops. It's designed for skint students or anyone who wants a second PC. Don't let the sub-£500 price tag fool you though, the Li 1718 has an impressive specification and comes with a good software bundle. It's available in Tesco stores (next to the spuds) for £499 or online for £478 throughout August, while stocks last. 

7.5

Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li 1718

The Good

Quick enough CPU; plenty of memory.

The Bad

Abysmal graphics performance.

The Bottom Line

The Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Li 1718 is a pretty good buy if you're after a second PC or something simple to type your essays on. It has plenty of memory, runs at a decent speed and has ample storage. Be warned though, the onboard graphics card is inept to say the least -- it won't run games and will barely play full-screen video

Design
The Amilo Li 1718 has a very derivative design. The lid is silver and the inside is black, which is pretty much what we expect from most laptops nowadays. It looks as if it was squeezed out of the same mould used by 90 per cent of manufacturers and given an extra sprinkle of ordinariness for good measure.

It's a fairly good size for students. Its 15.4-inch chassis is large enough so it's comfortable to use as a desktop replacement, and not so big that it's too bulky to lug around campus. You will need a rucksack or dedicated laptop bag to transport it, and possibly a couple of sessions at the gym if you're a bit weedy, but its 2.7kg frame should be fine for most users.

The Amilo Li 1718's ports are logically laid out, but there aren't many of them. There are two USB ports ports on the left and two more at the rear right corner. The modem and Ethernet networking ports are located on the rear left corner next to a D-Sub graphics output port, but that's about it. There's no ExpressCard, PC Card or memory card readers -- so transferring files to and from the machine will have to be done via USB.

The Li 1718's keyboard is a pleasant surprise. It feels comfortable to type with and unlike some laptops, the keys are where we expect them to be. The Ctrl button, for example, is to the left of the Fn key on the bottom left corner -- just as it should be. Plus the return key is quite large, which will appeal to touch typers.

Features
It's a common misconception that budget laptops have the processing power of a pocket calculator. The Li 1718 uses an Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 CPU clocked at 1.73GHz and a bountiful 2GB of DDR 2 memory. If it were a big cat, it would probably be a puma -- not quite as powerful as a lion, but fully capable of ripping your throat out nonetheless.

Unfortunately, the Li 1718's graphics performance is more like a kitten. The laptop uses an ATI Mobility Radeon M200 adaptor, which is franky lame. Don't be fooled by the fact it can leech up to 256MB of system memory -- it's barely fast enough to run full-screen video. Sure, it'll let you play the odd game, but you'll be tearing your hair out at the abysmal frame rates. It's a shame, really, because the 1,280x800-pixel display is pretty good all round.

As it's no good for movies or games, you'll probably be using the laptop's supplied 120GB hard drive for hoarding music. When it arrived in our labs it had approximately 73GB of space left, which is enough room to stash around 18,000 MP3s. That may sound like a lot, but active downloaders will run out of space sooner rather than later. Use the space wisely, buy yourself an external USB hard drive, and get some blank DVDs for the dual-layer DVD rewriter.

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