I bought my Fujitsu Lifebook S6231 in January 2005, when my previous laptop, a Gateway Solo 3450, was nearing the end of its warranty. In its lightest configuration, the Fujitsu weighs a little more (about 3.8 pounds) than the Gateway (about 3.0 pounds). The difference is that if I want extra battery life or a DVD drive, the Fujitsu has a modular bay for these things, and the Gateway doesn't.
As a result, the Fujitsu pays a much smaller weight penalty when all the attachments are in; the Fujitsu with either the DVD drive or the extended-life battery weighs only 4.0 pounds, whereas the Gateway increases to 3.5 pounds with the extended battery, and balloons to 5.0 pounds with the DVD drive (due to the necessity of a docking station).
The Fujitsu is also a considerably nicer machine. It has a so-called Crystal View display; in plain English, it looks brighter, putting my other laptop displays to shame, and the color balance is much nicer. Older laptop displays have a significantly yellower display, but the Fujitsu (and a number of other newer machines) have a display that has a better white.
The battery life is quite good. I got the top-of-the-line battery and the modular bay battery besides, and even with everything running hot, I get about 3 hours with one battery, and about 6 hours with two. With everything running cool (dim display, no multi-media or games), I get about 4 hours with one battery, and about 8 hours with two.
Performance-wise, my Fujitsu has a 1.6 MHz Pentium M with the Centrino collection (as I like to call it), 512 MB of memory, and an 80 GB hard disk. It's not a gaming machine, but it does just about everything else with aplomb. As with all my laptops, I've installed a flavor of Red Hat onto the Fujitsu; in the case of this machine, I've put Fedora Core 3 on it. You can read about the details here.
Additional information on installing Linux onto this laptop can be found at Linux on Laptops. There are currently no other write-ups on this particular machine, but it is most similar to the S6210.
Copyright (c) 2005 Brian Tung