Laptops Arena

The Toshiba Satellite is Toshiba's flagship in the notebook line. There are many models in the Satellite family, from the entry level models to high end models. Although these notebooks are called Satellite there is no relationship between the common use of the word (satellite phone, satphone) and these notebooks. From a common perspective, they are just notebook style computers.
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The Toshiba Satellite U505 - S2930 is a relatively new model under the price line of $800. This notebook provides a good balance between a large display and overall weight. The Toshiba Satellite U505 - S2930 comes with Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium operating system preinstalled. The notebook is made entirely out of plastic. Therefore the price is high for a plastic design and medium hardware. This notebook is highly portable while offering features like backlit keyboard and slot loading optical drive. The dimensions are significant, 12.4 x 9 x 1.3 inches, making the U505 - S2930 a thick notebook compared with other notebook from its class. Although the case is made out of plastic the Toshiba notebook has textures for a similar look to leather luggage. By doing so, Toshiba increases the notebook's case durability. Scratches, smudges and finger prints are not to be found on U505 - S2930 case.

The U505 is solid but does not provide enough multimedia power. The 13" screen has a 1280 x 800 pixels resolution. The text, videos, icons are easy to spot and read but the screen has washed out colors. The screens aspect ratio is a 16:10 format. The screen is bright and easy to work with. Because this is a 13" notebook model you get to have a full size keyboard. Unfortunately the keys are not that good placed and when you press the edge of a key you might find that the notebook recognized it as another key.

The U505 - S2930 is so thick because of the internal optical drive. The dual layer DVD burner found on the Toshiba notebook is however a nice feature. This model is equipped with a 2.1 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 CPU, 4 GB of RAM and a 320 GB hard drive (you can choose for the 400 GB model). Connectivity is ensured by the WLAN 802.11 a/g/n Wi-Fi. The system is also equipped with HMDI port and eSATA / USB combo port to charge mobile devices even when the machine is off. It even has a modem jack for dial up users.

The notebook sports a 1.2 MP webcam. Its quality is bad and it's inferior that to those on other laptops. However, Toshiba has included a nice feature like Web Camera Application (docks off screen and has 12 presets for a range of lighting conditions). Unfortunately the camera delivers poor low light performance. Other feature that is missing is the Bluetooth. If you want this feature on your Satellite U505 - S2930 you will have to make a special online configuration. The 4 GB RAM will be eaten up by the Intel GMA 4500 HD graphic chip.

U505 is not a gaming laptop; it can handle light 3D chores and not much more; even worse, than the lack of a dedicated graphic chip is the short battery life. If you are lucky than you can score up to 3 hours and 31 minutes but most of the time the U505 - S2930 will not pass 2 hours and 1 minute. The Toshiba Satellite U505 - S2930 has at second review a good design quality by covering the plastics with fashionable features. Its standby battery time is awful, while the cheap looking / working keyboard is also a considerable drawback. You can now upgrade your Satellite U505 - S2930 software from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 free of charge.



A nice feature is the Toshiba Face Recognition utility (you can use your biometric data as password). Other software worth mentioning, Power Cinema utility, Corel DVD, Movie Factory, Microsoft Works 9.0 and Toshiba's PC Health Monitor. Overall, this is a notebook with advantages and disadvantages. However if you are looking for an affordable notebook with some up to date features then you should pay some attention to the Toshiba Satellite U505 - S2930.

The Toshiba Satellite A200 laptop is at the border line between desktop, laptop, gaming, productivity and business, and exactly because of this strange mix it is a solid machine, but it is not stunning on any of the areas taken separately. A200 is in the middle of the laptop pack because of its 1.73GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 1GB of 667MHz DDR2 memory and a 5,400rpm 120GB hard disk drive. This system comes on double 512 MB configuration, so Vista's graphics requirements have to suffer, and you will have to buy two 1 GB replacements for the operating system to work properly.
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NVidia GeForce G7300 card takes care of the graphics, and it is enough to run the Aero interface but average for more intensive applications. This system was designed to be a desktop replacement, and something more grunt would have been more appreciated in the graphics aspect, even if the price would have been higher. If you want this laptop for its graphic capabilities, you can choose the PSPBGA-01X015 version of the A200, which includes the GeForce Go 7600 card, for a better video performance.

This laptop has a 1.3 Mp camera on the lif, which is not too much, but enough for webcam conferences with your family or recording videos with you and your pet. Toshiba comes with something interesting on this laptop, it includes a fingerprint reader, a biometric device added for security. It's good for the security conscious people or for those who have bad memory for passwords.

The lid has a glossy metallic bluish paint, and in the same time is a fingerprint magnet, but I have to admit that it looks elegant. The chassis is finshed in a silver/black combination and on the left part you can find the following connection ports: the video options for VGA and S-Video out, the Ethernet port, two USB and a 4 pin FireWire connector and the slot for Express Cards. On the right you have the DVD optical drive and two other USB ports. The USB ports on the both sides are great both for right and left handed laptop users, who can connect the mouse where it's more comfortable for them.

The touchpad is kind of small for the unused space at the bottom of the keyboard, and on top too, where the speakers and the live buttons are. The screen has a glossy finish and it is good in room's light, but in sunlight I observed that I can barely see the things on the screen. The shy Radeo 3300 PCMarks offers some functionality and suits office applications and gaming too. The DVD was ok in ambient lighting, but if I tilted my head too far, the black was not true and the details missed. The noticeable advantage is that this laptop offers good sound quality for a portable device.



At maximum power performance and brightness, the battery's life is around an hour and half, which is pretty short, but I think it was designed to live its life on a desk, so I did not expect anything special in this matter. Battery life is not stunning , but it can help you do some work, or play a mini game for a short time.

All in all, this laptop was designed to be good for everyone, and it does not excell in any of the features. It is not a gaming machine, it is jut one step over the integrated graphics, and the memory is as good to run Vista, which actually would work better after a RAM upgrade. For its price tag, it is a good multi-functional laptop.

Toshiba Tecra M8 is quite similar to Toshiba Satellite U305, and it is easy to observe that these two products have the same case and many other inside parts are common to both models. M8 is on the border of ultraportable series, and with its thin design, it is the lightest notebook in its class, the 13.3'' notebooks. Toshiba has successfully designed a compact and stylish frame with unique elements. All these aspects make it attractive to both students and business professionals.
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The cover comes only in titanium silver, and it looks like painted in gray with metal flakes. This silver paint is also on the palm rests and around the keyboard, and it looks pretty elegant. The color and the pattern are important, because fingerprints are almost invisible on this M8. The rest of the case is made of black plastic, matte. The display has WXGA resolution (1280x800) and the horizontal viewing angles are better than the average notebooks have them. The brightness of the display is great and the colors are vivid. A minor color inversion appears when the screen is viewed from very sharp vertical angles. Built-in camera is good, and the resolution is very good, 1.3 megapixels. Audio performance is average for a 13.3'' notebook. It is far from impressive, but the audio speakers are located in a good position, which directions the sound toward the user.

This laptop comes with a processor in a range between Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 (1.8GHz) and Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 (2.4GHz). The Intel X3100 graphic board extends battery life and reduces heat, because it is integrated. This laptop is a business notebook and not a "gaming machine", and the lack of the dedicated graphics card isn't such a big disadvantage.

The touchpad seems durable and it is very responsive. The edges make the touchpad look smaller than it really is, and the buttons are quite hard to press. They seem to show no feedback and they don't seem responsive at all. Toshiba M8 has a six cell battery, and the 9 cell battery is also available. If you set the computer on "High Performance" you will get a battery life of almost 2 hours and 30 minutes.

Toshiba M8 is a solid notebook, good for business, and it offers a lot of features, but few problems in the same time. The glossy display, sizeable hard drive and a good pack of ports make of it an excellent work machine. The impressive backbone for performance is given by the processor and plenty available RAM. The sturdy design and the conveninent fingerprint reader shows us that this machine is made for business.

Toshiba’s Mini NB205 is the first netbook to be released as a consumer device in the USA at a low cost (US $399.99) and an easy portability that makes it fit in the sizes of a normal purse. Its design is offered in an attractive range of colors, the screen lid is made of textured plastic, but as nice as it looks on the inside it presents a construction of the chassis that tends to flex and makes a creaking noise the moment you press your fingers against it. The bottom of the netbook has beside the air vents holes a pair of access lids for the RAM and hard drive access. The dimensions of 10.4 x 8.3 x 1.0/.127 inches lead to a weight of 2.95 pounds, making it easy to handle and to carry all over the places.
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The 1024 x 600 native resolution display of a 10.1” widescreen doesn’t reveal to have a high resolution as the other netbooks in its series; with viewing angles that are considered to be average, especially when it presents a color inversion while vertically viewed from bellow. The speaker performance that is built-in is good while listening to systems sounds but that good for its category, the great thing added to it is the audio input while using earphones or good external speakers. The keyboard is full-sized occupying the entire front space of the frame, but the keys are not that steady while typing, whereas the touchpad feels rather good in terms of sensitivity.

The ports of the device are the basic ones: 3 USB 2.0, VGA out, Ethernet, microphone and headphone jacks, and SD/SDHC media card slot; the netbook is equipped with a 0.3 Megapixel webcam. The performance is rendered by Intel Atom N280 (1.66GHz, 533MHz FSB) CPU, Intel GMA 950 graphics, LAN onboard 10/100 Mbps Ethernet controller, a memory of 1GB (DDR2 533MHz), Wireless: 802.11b/g and Bluetooth V2.1 and a storage capacity of 160GB hard drive (5400rpm) and SD/SDHC media card reader.

Next to the common results that a netbook performances offer (a daily usage of Website accessing, e-mailing, listening to music, using Microsoft Office) there is a notable feature encountered while testing the Toshiba’s NB205 model: the inclusion of bloatware – an app used for webcam, for wireless controls, for monitoring the battery and Norton Antivirus, but unfortunately this app lead to a slower performance of the machine. Another limitation for netbooks, generally speaking, is the use of Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics; ok, this IGP proves to be powerful enough to watch DVDmovies, but when it comes to 1080p video playback or even editing videos it doesn’t show to be your best choice of an IGP usage.

The operating system is supported by Microsoft Windows XP Home SP3 and is powered by 6-cell Lithium-Ion with a duration of a promised 9 hours life, though the tests never reached that performance with a fully charged battery, but rather 7 hours and 38 minutes at 70% brightness of the screen, active wireless and XP fixed for the laptop/portable power settings. All in one, Toshiba Mini NB205 looks attractive, provides ways to easy access the upgrades and a battery life that worth being mentioned as one of the best among the netbooks categories.

The new Toshiba mini NB205 (NB205-N210) is similar to the mini NB205-310 in that it has the same internal specs, it still lacks the silver island-keyboards, and Bluetooth and differ from one another through aesthetics. It measures 10.4 x 7.6 x 1.3 inches and because of the battery jutting out from the back it doesn’t make it to be one the slimmest netbooks. The weight of 2.8 pounds and 3.4 to include the adapter is rendering the device a certain easiness while carrying it on the shoulder. The case is of plastic one with traditional keyboard and a touchpad that keeps being one of the best to be found on a netbook.
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The 1024 x 600 pixel resolution presented on a 10.1” display is created in a rightful amount of glossy. Dual stereo speakers are not that powerful as one may meet on other netbooks but on Skype calls the sound was clear enough to satisfy a user. A 0.3 megapixel webcam is showing clear images in a video chat over Skype.

The netbook has its ports divided as it follows: on the right side we have 2 USB ports and a Kensington lock slot, andon the left side the device is equipped with VGA-out, audio in/out, Ethernet and third USB port. The 3-in-1 memory card reader is located along the front side lid. The performance is given by Intel’s latest 1.66-GHz Atom N280 processor that scored 1,493 on the PCMark05. The graphics are provided by an Intel GMA 950 graphics chip that could transcode a 5:05 MPEG-4 video clip to the AVI format in 27 minutes and 39 seconds. The hard drive of 160GB, 5,400 rpm booted Wndows XP in 60 seconds.

The device has 802.11b/g Wi-Fi card which delivered adequate performance, scoring well above the netbook averages of 18.9 and 15.8 Mbps. The power of the system is provided by a standard 6-cell 5800 mAh Lithium-ion batter that rules over all the netbooks power supplies. The power of the system enables the machine to last 9 hours and 41 minutes, which is 1 hour and 23 minutes better the best known in this matter – MSI Wind U123. The netbook can be upgraded on your own, since Toshiba isn’t offering any configuration options. The device is preinstalled with Windows XP Home and comes with an entire bundle of software, HDD Protection, Zoom Utility software, ConfigFree (it provides a convincing interface with networks displayed in range) and PC Health Monitor.

Toshiba mini NB205 (NB205-N210) is on the market cheaper than other netbooks and even if it presents a basic design, it still excels with its touchpad and the long lasting battery life.