Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
Powered by: newtelligence dasBlog 2.3.9074.18820
Disclaimer The posts on this weblog are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confer no rights. The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
E-mail
Well, I’ve had my Lifebook P7120 (review) for over a week now. I LOVE IT. This is the best PC laptop I’ve ever owned. When compared to the Sony TX Series it has the following advantages:
The build quality of the laptop is like a Thinkpad. This thing is solid, scratch proof, black, easy to type on, and has the best trackpad I’ve ever used on a laptop (as good as a PowerBook trackpad). It made me realize what a piece of junk the trackpad on Toshiba and Dells.
One nice touch on this laptop is that I can remove the DVD burner to save about .4 lbs which makes the travel weight 2.65 lbs, lighter than the Vaio TX Series. I can also add another battery in the DVD drive bay to increase battery life to approx 11 hours. Right now I’m getting about 5.5 hours with brightness set to 7/8.
Now, it’s not as “sexy” as the Vaio but that’s ok with me. The screen is not wafer thin, and it’s a bit smaller in width. But the overall thickness of the Lifebook is very close to the TX series anyway (with the rubber feet and all on a table they are almost identical even though the advertised thickness does not bode well for the Lifebook).
Some other pluses: I did not have to flatten the PC cause it wasn’t loaded up with Junkware. I did have one problem with their supposed power savings program. For some silly reason it will only run for a local administrator, not a domain account with local administrator privileges. I emailed Fujitsu about this but they are hopeless. In the mean time I found this great freeware battery monitor program. The Bluetooth module requires the crappy Toshiba bluetooth stack and will not work with the Microsoft stack (bummer). Another nice touch is that when the laptop successfully enters standby it beeps. I can’t tell you how useful that is because I've been burned many times by Windows preventing my laptop from going into standby causing my battery to get sucked dry. Speaking of standby, this little guy resumes from standby faster than any other laptop I’ve owned. It’s as fast as a PowerBook (and they are really fast). This must be some kind of hardware/driver thing.
I’m writing this on a plane right now, and love the fact that the laptop is really easy to use in coach even with the seat in front of me reclined.
Bottom line. This is an incredible laptop and IMHO outshines the Vaio TX Series in every way except for some subtle design aspects. It’s a fast machine and I have yet to experience any performance compromises compared to my Dell Latitude D610.