An unusual Upgrade: (Retrospective) Review of Fujitsu Lifebook E743
Why An Unusual Upgrade?
I’m used to be a ThinkPad user, who has purchased the 2nd generation of ThinkPad x1 Yoga. In terms of hardware and performance, I was generally satisfied with it. Since I started some personal experiments and projects, the performance of the low power dual processor has become quite insufficient. Therefore, I started my search of a suitable notebook with better performance with portability staying as similar as possible to what x1 Yoga has. Due to my limited budget, I don’t have many choices but going back to older platforms with standard quad-core processors.
Few days ago, I could find an offer on eBay Germany, which is the laptop I’m going to review. With 225€ of price, it did come with an 35W i7 3632QM and (surprisingly) 16GB of DDR3 1600 RAM. All in all, beside the lack of fingerprint reader and significantly aged battery, nothing can be really complained.
Appearance and the first touch
Appearance wise, nothing is that flashy besides its (mostly) plastic body plate — typical for business notebook from that time, but less common for nowadays. The display is 14 inches, which is why I chose this exact model, with a wide enough bezel around it. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the trend of the thinnest bezel competition, because the reduced bezel could potentially also reduce the whole robustness of screen.
The thickness is almost the sweet spot from my point of view. The 20mm thick body did not really bother me that much. When I’m carrying it around, I didn’t feel the difference between 17mm that the x1 yoga has and 20mm. I’m even more happy with this because the thicker chassis would be able to improve the cooling performance. And so is the weight for me. 1,7kg vs 1,4kg doesn’t mean a lot. 300g is not even as much as an average coffee drink that you will get in a typical German supermarket.
Like every older laptop, E743 has a wide range selection of ports. With 3 USB 3.0 ports on the either side and one USB 2.0 port, there’s enough extension for me to use, especially with a docking station which carries more ports. Two ports for video output, one DP and VGA, great, but somehow unusual. My experience tells me, when no HDMI, then dongle. That also applies here. Of course, there are still “vintage” ports like SD card reader and smart card reader. RJ45 and audio jacks (surprisingly, but also within my expectation, the mic and headphone jacks are separate). The only issue I would like to address is that you will not able to plug DP and VGA at the same time, one is always to fat to fit another one in.
The only thing I would rather complain is the metal palm rest. With an ungrounded power cord, you will feel as if you are playing with electroscope or charged metal ball in the school.
As far as the appearance goes, I don’t feel anything weird when switching from a highly “modern” device to a “bulky and vintage” one. This may not be for everyone, but for me, it gets my point.
Input and Output
Every ThinkPad enthusiast is crazy about the excellent typing experience that ThinkPad offers. Obviously, even with the reduced key travel that x1 yoga has comparing to something like T or other X series of ThinkPad, x1 yoga still has the best in class typing experience with its stabilised key press and trigger force.
By switching to Lifebook, the comfort of typing is reduced significantly. The shallow key travel and non-stabilised key press made me really uncomfortable in the first hours of using. After two months of using, it feels somehow better, but it is still not compitable with the ThinkPad’s keyboard.
When we are talking about trackpads, no one would doubt that the modern windows precision verified trackpads did change the whole windows notebook markets. Nowadays, every windows laptop has a somewhat usable trackpad. Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to the old guys like E743. The trackpad that can’t be clicked beyond the marked area really triggered me. This gets worse because there are no dedicated buttons for left and right mouse button.
Another disappointment comes with the uncomfortable and hard to use pointing stick. Someone who is familiar with ThinkPad TrackPoint, will hate this. It has a hard-plastic coating and is imprecise and there is no way to really use this particular nub in the way that track points were designed to be — moving mouse cursor without moving hands off from keyboard. It is almost impossible to press mouse button when using this TrackPoint without moving my right hand. Certainly, I may not have a long enough thumb to operate this, but I still consider this as a design flaw.
Display
Yes, it is an TN display with poor viewing angle and color gamut. Yes, it is a lower-res display with 1600x900 resolution. But beside the first issue, this is the reason I switched to this platform due to poor HiDPi optimization that windows provide. Anyone who has ever used java-based software under windows with HiDPI screen knows that the scaling issue still exists under windows. Anything that is remotely legacy will not behave properly with higher dpi.
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of eye piercing high resolution. 1600x900 is kind of the sweet spot for working. With a 14-inch screen, there’s really no need to go too high beyond 1080P unless you place your eyes centimeters in front of your display.
Coming back to the resolution, 1600x900 means around 110 ppi on a 14-inch screen, for which no scaling is needed. This is important for some coders who works with (legacy) programs with less support for HiDPI. Since Windows lets the programs do the scaling job instead of having a system-wide control for scaling, older programs can get blurry texts or resized icons (Yes, I’m talking about something like eclipse, modelsim, multisim). I hate that.
Another problem regarding the scaling issue is with the docking station. I’m a huge fan of the docking station idea. Being able to dock my laptop in when backing home and have a full desktop experience is hugely important for me. And I wish to be able to do that without any hazzles, that means also without logging off and on or even turn off before connecting to the dock or plugging off the dock. Sadly, Windows is not good at it. Whenever I’m trying to do that, Windows will prompt me to restart to apply new scaling setting. The solution is, either to change displays according to DPI or to wait Microsoft to give a solution.
Although Fujitsu never releashed the exact model number of the panel used on this laptop, with enough searches, I’m pretty sure that the model LP140WD1 is used.
The brightness of this panel is adequate. According to the information from panellook.com, this screen will reach 300 nits with 45% NTSC coverage. Good for its time.
As far as I know, this model is using PWM to adjust brightness. I’m not that sensitive for lower frequency PWM, but I would not recommend this to the readers who have issues with this (I would also not recommend OLED for them, respectively).
Accessories
Almost every business notebook model has a wider or short range of accessories. Especially the Japanese, who are more and less focusing on this field, offers different sort of accessories. As the promotion dictates, you can install a secondary battery, travel cover, an adapter for secondary HDD and DVD, even a projector in the so-called MultiBay.
I really like this idea and it is sad to me that the manufacturers are scarifying this for thinness and portability.
Everything comes with a drawback and in our case this time, the price is. Due to (in my opinion) low number of existing machines, the prices of the replacement parts are extremely rare and expensive. A set of batteries (77Wh + 28Wh multibay battery) will cost more than 200€. Whether I’m going to purchase them will be a question, because I don’t know if this machine would be the next working horse for next 3 years or just a temporary replacement for this year.
There is an official docking station available that you can get from various merchants in refurbished form. With a sufficient power supply, the dock will cost around 20€. This dock will support almost every E-series laptop until Sky Lake era. The dock provides you with 4 USB 3.0 ports, two displayports, a single DVI and VGA port. It’s to notice that the DVI port is shared with a displayport, and the dock supports up to two displays. Since HD 4000 doesn’t support MST, you can’t daisychain displays with the displayport provided.
Since I could not find a grounded original power supply, I chose to use the Lenovo USB-C adapter. With an USB-C adapter, I can charge the laptop as usual with an USB-PD certified power bank or power supply. I personally have an ZMI10 power bank rated for 72 Wh. With the main battery attached to the laptop, the total capacity goes up to whopping 125 Wh. If I would like to max it out, I can get a capacity of 77 + 28 + 72 = 177Wh, definitely less than 188Wh coming with ThinkPad T430 (94Wh 9-Cell + 94Wh Sliced), but in charge of smaller size and less weight.
Performance and Maintenance
The overall performance of this laptop is great. With a Quadcore i7 that is rated for 35W, it has enough horse power to do any everyday task. In my use case, it feels now much better when running several VMs in parallel with some chrome tabs and PDFs open. Switching between processes feels way snappier now than before.
Although I prefer evaluating the performance by putting into scenarios rather than running bunches of benchmarks, I still let the good old cinebench R15 a try. As expected, the processor will clock up all the way to 2,9 GHz and stays on this clock speed. At the end, i7 3632QM on this machine will achieve something like 510 points, which is closed to what an ULV quadcore processor will achieve with 15W power limit. Because of older lithography, the power consumption running in full till is around 30W, almost double from its modern counterparts. Fujitsu designed the cooling system adequately enough, so that the core temperature never goes beyond 90 °C. Bear in mind, this temperature is recorded with the whatever stock bulk thermal paste that the refurbishing dealer used. I will very likely apply thermalgrizzly’s kryonant or even conductinant in the future. I expect a temperature drop of around 6–10 °C when using my own thermal paste.
With an Ivy Bridge platform, you are limited to 16GB RAM running at 1600 MHz, which is ok for the most of daily scenarios. For my use case, 32GB or even 64GB RAM are more than welcome.
E743 supports up to 2 storage devices. The 2.5-inch bay is located underneath the trackpad, a weird location. In order to replace this, you have to disassemble the C cover, which also requires removing most of the visible screws on the surface and popping out the keyboard . After that, you will be able to see the hard drive bay and the whole back side of the mainboard. There is also an empty slot for LTE card. After testing, this slot doesn’t seem to be wired with SATA interface. The DVD drive can be replaced for an HDD caddy, which has been mentioned before.
In terms of the graphical department, there is not a lot to talk about. An integrated HD4000 will not let you run anything remotely intensive. Be happy when your Minecraft world is running at 60 FPS when everything turned to high.
Battery life and noise
There are different choices for batteries. Nowadays you can still get 24Wh, 48Wh, 56Wh, 63Wh, 72Wh and 77Wh batteries from Fujitsu or aftermarket. Since Fujitsu keeps the same design from this version until the end of the E7 line, you can obviously use the batteries for the newer E7x6 on this machine. Therefore, you can also purchase a multibay battery rated at 28Wh if you often travel without a power outlet.
Due to the notorious high price of the 72Wh and 77Wh variant (both over 100€ mark), I went for the aftermarket 56Wh battery, which gives me around 5–6 hours of lighter use such as typing, internet etc. If more demanding tasks would be done, the battery life will shrink to around 2–3 hours.
Based on my measurement, a fully load-out E743 with 77Wh main and 28Wh bay battery will last around 10 hours of lighter use, which is enough for a whole workday or a longer learning session in a library.
The noise is fully acceptable. Only when you really push it to its limit, the fan noise is audible but not significant. Under full till, the fan will be noisy but still acceptable.
Conclusion
For my use case, this laptop is even a better choice for tighter budget comparing to the modern ultrabooks. I’m a frequent traveler who always travels between Mannheim and Strasbourg (up until the pandemic and after that), I need a little powerhouse when I’m away from my writing table. This form factor and performance are just the sweet spot for me. When needed, I can just use the built-in WWAN to connect to my server and workstation at home.
Will I recommend it? Maybe. It is nowadays more for enthusiast who knows what they really need and how they achieve this. The modularity still enables a lot of possibilities to upgrade it, although Fujitsu as manufacturer is not really interested in it. Due to the smaller number of existing pieces comparing to some more mainstream models such as ThinkPad T series or Latitude or EliteBook, you will definitely find less upgrade guide and mod to buy, but I hope that my review could help someone or just do a little contribution to the geek community who are interested in this field.
My end configuration after upgrading:
CPU: Intel Core i7 3632QM
RAM: 16GB DDR3–1600
Storage: Crucial 500GB SSD + Samsung 860 QVO 1TB
Graphics: Intel HD4000
Wifi: Intel AX200HW Wifi 6
WWAN: Sierra GOBI 3000
Everything in a nutshell:
Pro:
- Light weight and compact size for its era
- Great upgradability
- Descent image quality for a TN panel
- Wide range selection of ports
- Lower price (comparing to ThinkPad)
Contra
- Lack of support from Fujitsu, almost no maintenance guide
- Accessories are rare and therefore expensive
- Bad pointing device and mediocre keyboard
- Unable to connect to 3 external displays, even with the docking station
