Fujitsu Lifebook NH751 review

Considering the powerful components inside it, a battery life of just over three hours in our light-use test is unsurprising, even with Nvidia’s Optimus technology disabling the graphics card to reduce power consumption. This result, when combined with its weight, means we wouldn’t expect many people to be taking the NH751 on the move; at 3.6kg, it’s definitely a heavyweight.

In terms of storage, the Blu-ray drive is a highlight. It’s capable of writing Blu-ray discs as well as reading them, so you can back up huge amounts of data and burn HD home movies. A multi-format memory card reader, ExpressCard/54 slot, a shared eSATA/USB port and three extra USB ports are also welcome inclusions, but it’s a shame none of them support USB3.

We had no trouble typing on the full-size keyboard, despite the keys being very closely grouped together. We rarely made errors thanks to the reasonable amount of tactile feedback, although the entire tray flexes significantly under pressure. The small touchpad felt cramped compared to the huge screen, but was still responsive. Oddly, multi-touch gestures were disabled by default, but once we’d turned them on they were mostly accurate. We did find ourselves tapping the touchpad for mouse clicks more often than usual, because the physical buttons felt spongy and not particularly satisfying to use.

The NH751 is one of the few laptops we’re happy calling a ‘desktop replacement’, as it has many of the features we would expect to see in a desktop PC, excepting USB3. If you can live with a Blu-ray player rather than a writer, a 1,600×900 screen and a slower processor, the excellent HP dv7-6051ea (which has USB3 support and better battery life) would be a good alternative. However, if you’ll use the extra power, resolution and ability to write to Blu-ray discs, the NH751 is worth the extra £200.