Digital Archaeology: LifeBook N6010

darth-azrael(73)

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The Pentium 4 wasn't the greatest CPU for a laptop. It used a lot of power which isn't great for either portability or battery life. Nevertheless, there was a brief period of time where the Pentium 4 was the only choice if you wanted a high performance laptop. This meant you were out of luck if you wanted something thin and light but not so bad if you were looking for a desktop replacement.

The Fuji LifeBook N6010 falls into the latter category. It is a large machine with a 17-inch screen and certainly power hungry with a Pentium 4 538 @ 3.2 GHz with hyperthreading and an AMD Radeon 9700. Basic specs include:

CPU; Pentium 4 538 @ 3.2 GHz
Memory: 512 MB DDR-333 (upgradeable to 2 GB)
Video: ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with 128 MB
Screen: 1440x900

For more complete specs, check out the output from HWiNFO or CPU-Z.

The powerful CPU and GPU combo (for the time anyway) should make a pretty good gaming machine for games of that era which means a bunch of Windows XP games (though perhaps not later ones). One interesting features is the volume control. There are a couple of hardware buttons above the keyboard on the right side for increasing/decreasing the volume and also a red LED display of the volume (0-15). It looks kind of neat but it seems like an unnecessary addition that just adds expense. Or maybe it was just cheaper than an onscreen display at the time.

The 1440x900 resolution is pretty good but with a monitor this large it would have been better if it were 1920x1200. Having said that, the lower resolution is probably better for gaming at that time. It's also more than good enough for DVD quality video which was still the standard then.

My unit is in pretty good condition with the only negative being that the touchpad does not seem to work. I tried installing different drivers and even booting a Linux live CD and it didn't work there either so I assume it is actually faulty. Seems a strange thing to go bad but it is definitely not working...at all. I prefer using a mouse anyway and it's not like I'm going to be carrying it around.

The only significant upgrades you could really do with this laptop is to upgrade the RAM to 2GB and swap out the 60GB mechanical drive with an SSD. My machine still has the original installation of Windows XP on it. With upgraded RAM it should be able to run Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8. There should also be some Linux distributions that would run acceptably. Since this machine is a likely candidate to try out some gaming on, i'll probably keep Windows XP on it but I will probably upgrade it to 2 GB at some point.

Like all of the hardware I play with, this laptop has BOINC installed and is crunching tasks for a couple of projects. It doesn't currently have enough RAM for Einstein@home but it is working on tasks for Asteroids@home, World Community Grid and Moo! Wrapper. You can see how it is doing overall at FreeDC.