Laptop help needed kind of urgently. 😱

ayeshasi

So purchased a gift for my daughter. A Fujitsu life book. When we went Comet my husband was told by staff that this definitely has an optical drive. We have the laptop at home. For some reason I was looking at it again online and noticed that it actually doesn't! And it's a notebook.

Can someone please have a look and tell me if this is worth the money? The gift is for today (sat).

http://mobile.comet.co.uk/p/Laptops/buy-FUJITSU-LIFEBOOK-AH-531-Laptop/123740

esuhl

I really haven't kept up-to-date with prices and specs... but that looks like a pretty good deal to me (but, maybe I'm very out of touch!)

I'd think that not having an optical drive would be an advantage as it would save a bit of space & weight for something that hardly ever gets used anyway. If you have another PC with an optical drive, you can put a CD in that drive and access it from the notebook over your local network.

zenmaster

I bought one today.

It most definitely does have an "optical" drive. It's a CD/DVD rewrite drive situated on the right hand side of the machine.

It's good value for the money.

prowla

The specifications say "Supports Double layer & Dual Format +/- recording", which indicates an optical drive.

Figment

A notebook is another name for a laptop.

An optical drive is a CD/DVD drive. Are you confusing this with SSD (Solid State Drive)?

ayeshasi

Well online specs say no optical drive. When I called comet the staff physically went to check and it does have it!!!!! My husband is on its way to make sure lol!

sabretoothtigger

It either plays a dvd or not. The spec details arent helpful

prowla

ayeshasi wrote: »

Well online specs say no optical drive. When I called comet the staff physically went to check and it does have it!!!!! My husband is on its way to make sure lol!

As commented, the online specs (click on Show all specifications) say:

prowla wrote: »

The specifications say "Supports Double layer & Dual Format +/- recording", which indicates an optical drive.

double layer and +/- recording refer to optical media.

Even though the spec also says "Optical Drive Type - No"

ayeshasi

Lol. Husband went and physically checked too. It does have an option to insert cd/DVD. Other than that what do you think of the laptop?

BigRonW

Coulkd it be that you were confusing the (admittedly very simlar) words "Notebook" and "Netbook"?

A "Netbook" is a small laptop (usually with a 10" screen) based closely around Intel's low-power-consumption "Atom" 1.6Ghz processor. It's physically too small to house an "optical" drive.

It's a kind of !!!!!!!iized great-grandchild of John Negroponte's "OPC" project - an attempt to produce a laptop that was so cheap, one could be given to every child in the 3rd world.. ASUS came up with their "EEE" computer, which had a 7" screen, no hard OR optical drives, and which ran a version of Linux called (IIRC) "Linpus".. Kids here in the West demanded that it should be able to run Windows XP... so ASUS kept upgrading it. Negropente's scheme pretty much died out.

ayeshasi

Yeh maybe. This is 15'6 inch laptop/net book.