9. Using The LifeBook N6410

Watching TV and DVDs on the Fujitsu has its ups and downs. It offers lots of sharp detail courtesy of the display's 1600x1200 resolution. Image quality sometimes leaves a little to be desired, however, particularly in the rendering of shadows: dark areas on screen often tend to look pixilated, particularly with spurious reds and blues on what should otherwise be an all-black screen. This is pretty minor, however, and takes keen attention even to notice. None of these issues manifest on the big screen, when you drive an external monitor or a TV set using the S-Video or composite video outputs. (Our Dell 24" monitor and Olevia Syntax 32" HDTV both looked good working with this unit.) As a personal DVD player, this unit is adequate.

Listening to music is a pretty positive experience on the Fujitsu. As with most notebooks, it's necessary to crank the volume up to the max to get listenable sound on the built-in speakers. That said, the sound quality is reasonably crisp and clean, with a surprising amount of bass and clear mid-range and high frequency tones. Once again, those who want really clear or loud audio from these units will be best served by a pair of headphones - we got fine results from both a pair of ear buds and higher-fidelity closed-ear headphones - or by piping the sound from the SPDIF output to a home entertainment center.

The remote control for the Fujitsu has a boxy enclosure that lacks the Microsoft remote's curvy fit to the hand. Its button layout is identical enough to the MS remote to require no learning curve for easy use. When the external IR receiver was attached to an open USB port it worked immediately. The receiver featured two obligatory IR blasters for attachment to set-top cable or satellite boxes.

We found the Fujitsu's control buttons sufficiently confusing to require a trip to the manual to figure out how to set them up to our liking, and then to use them properly. But we figured it out in under five minutes, and once learned, they proved reasonably easy to use. Overall, the multimedia experience on this notebook was positive and the various components all worked together well.