Digital Trends

Fujitsu LifeBook S6510

January 23rd, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

We put the S6510 through our standard testing regimen which involves using it for several weeks like we would any other notebook, and came away pretty impressed. At first glance you would think it’s the same weight as any other notebook that is similar in size, but it’s incredibly light. Our own personal notebook is a 14.1” Dell that seems like a brick in comparison.

The S6510 was always snappy and responsive in Windows, and we never sensed any slowness or sluggishness through general use. It’s Windows Experience Index score of 3.4 was totally dragged down by its onboard graphics. Most of its hardware scored rather high on the scale.

The S6510’s low Experience Index score is the result of the onboard Intel graphics.

Hard drive shock

The onboard drive monitor software seems pretty cool, and would show us a warning whenever we tilted the notebook a bit. What’s even cooler is you can actually adjust the sensitivity of the sensor, going as far to adjust the sensitivity along individual X, Y and Z axis of movement. You can also set it to automatically lock the notebook with a password if it senses it is being carried.

Tilt the S6510 a bit and the shock sensor notifies you that it’s moved the drive heads for safety.

Battery life

Fujitsu claims that the included 6-cell battery last about 4.5 hours, but since these claims are always just a bit inflated we tested by looping a DVD movie. In our tests, we were able to squeeze out three hours and 20 minutes from the S6510, which is pretty good but obviously less than the stated specification. Fujitsu also offers an extra battery that can be wedged into the notebook’s “modular bay,” which also houses the optical drive. Fujitsu claims both batteries bring the total battery life up to 6.5 hours, but we did not test this claim since we didn’t receive the additional battery.

Security

The S6510 has two main security devices; the onboard fingerprint scanner and the Security Panel, which doubles as a set of quick-launch keys. The fingerprint scanner worked wonderfully. We registered two fingers with short swipes, and this then became the de facto login routine for the computer, which is great.

You have to “enroll” your fingers into the scanner program, but the enrollment process is painless.

Once we had enrolled our fingers we found that the biometric scanner could also attach website passwords to your fingerprint, which is awesome. We logged into a few sites, had the software remember the password, and the next time we went to the site we just swiped our finger and it logged us into our Gmail account, for example. 

The biometric scanner can also let you log into websites with the swipe of your finger.

Aside from the finger scanner there’s a security panel beneath the LCD. The row of numbered keys function as customizable shortcut keys in Windows (one opens IE, one opens calculator, etc), but they can be configured to be a combination lock of sorts. You’d have to punch in the correct combination of keys to boot the PC, or at least that’s what we were told. We tried to set it up but it said it needed a supervisor password first, which we did not have. Our guess is it requires a domain administrator to configure it, which makes sense.

These keys can be configured to be a combination lock of sorts, where pressing the right sequence allows the notebook to boot.