The SH760 is a good system for those wanting business grunt and the speed advantages that USB 3.0 can offer. With an optional battery (which Fujitsu sells as an addon) to bump up the working life, it will perform even better.
Design
Take a glance at the SH760's touchpad and you'll spot a tiny circle to the side. Is it a sleeping Pac-Man? A sign that somebody in the Fujitsu factory fell asleep with a Dremel power tool on? A big black shiny notebook self-destruct button?
No, it's none of these things. It's a circular scroll wheel, but without the actual wheel bit. Fans of older non-touch iPod models may appreciate its inclusion, at least in theory. It certainly stands out visually.
At a physical level, the SH760 is a very pleasant unit to use. The keyboard has great tactile feel and response, and unlike many 13-inch notebooks, the cursor keys aren't shrunk down to the point where they become sub-optimal. The one physical feature we plain didn't like was the scroll wheel. Depending on how you type, it's possible to nudge it while working, sending your work into a spin. It does operate the way you may expect, but it's instantly redundant as the side of the actual touchpad still handles vertical scrolling in the way that every other touchpad on the market does. Plus, the general need for horizontal scrolling isn't that great.
Features
Strange scroll wheel aside, Fujitsu doesn't scrimp on the feature set for the SH760. An Intel Core i7 M 620 2.67GHz processor runs the whole show, aided by 4GB of RAM, a 512MB GeForce 310M graphics chip and a 500GB 5400rpm hard drive. The 13.3-inch display has a top resolution of 1,366 x 768, which isn't super-crisp but adequate in this kind of screen size.
From a connectivity point of view, the SH760 is very nicely equipped. You get an ExpressCard slot, two USB 2.0 ports, VGA and HDMI for video connectivity, DVD multi-writer, Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n Wi-Fi, an SDHC card reader, fingerprint scanner, Webcam and microphone-in and audio-out ports. The star of the show is the single USB port that sits on the left-hand side. It's the first USB 3.0 port we've hit in a notebook available to the Asian market, with all the promise of higher-speed data transfers that USB 3.0 should deliver.
On the software front, Fujitsu keeps the SH760 firmly in business territory with Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, as well as Softex Omnipass, CyberLink PowerDVD, CyberLink PowerDirector, Roxio Easy Media Creator, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Fujitsu UpdateNavi, Fujitsu 3D Shock Sensor Utility, Fujitsu Power Saving Utility, Fujitsu Hardware Diagnostic Tool, Fujitsu Display Manager, Sun Microsystems Java Runtime, CyberLink YouCam and Windows Live Essentials preinstalled. You also get a 60-day trial version of Microsoft Office Professional 2007. One nice feature in the software setup is that antivirus software is installed, andit's not the usual 30-day trial version. Instead, you get a full year's subscription to Norman Virus Control.
One physical aspect we found mildly irksome was the motion sensor. It's designed to park the hard drive heads if unexpected movement is detected, potentially saving your data. That's great in theory, but in our experience the sensor was very twitchy, indeed. Just picking up the SH760 was enough to have it park the heads, which is enough to temporarily halt any onboard activity, including music or video playback.
Performance And Battery Life
Given its decent internals, we expected the SH760 to perform well in our benchmark test. And it did with a solid PCMark05 score of 6,410 and 3DMark score of 3,811. We doubt many of these systems will be purchased by those with games in mind, but if it's a system the boss lets you take home over the weekend, you'd be well-served.
We were curious to see what difference the USB 3.0 port on the side of the SH760 would make, so we hooked up a Seagate GoFlex drive to it. Testing with the USB 2.0 cable that comes as standard, we averaged a very ordinary 17.9Mbps copying a 1.94GB test folder of files. Switching to the USB 3.0 cable on the same port bumped speeds up nicely to an average of 49Mbps.
The one area where the SH760 didn't wow us was in battery life. Running our standard full-screen video test with battery-saving features disabled, the SH760's six-cell 5,800mAh battery conked out after 2 hours 38 minutes of playback. Non-video use could undoubtedly eke out more than that, but this is still well short of what we'd like a portable notebook to manage.
Service And Support
Fujitsu LifeBook has a one-year international warranty. At Fujitsu's support Web site, LifeBook owners can register their warranty online as well as download the latest drivers. For simple problems, the company offers a helpline and email address for troubleshooting. Should the unit require further diagnosis or repair, the customer will have to send the unit to the service center. There are options at point of sale to upgrade the warranty to two or three years.
