Laptops Arena

At the price of $600 the new Toshiba’s release Satellite L505-S5966 proves to be a notebook that worth its money especially for those who need to surf the Web, to run Microsoft Office, watch widescreen movies or listen to the music.

The design is following the Toshiba style with a keyboard deck sport that is colored in the grey Breeze style, with a glossy lid that hides somehow the fingerprints due to the neutral color. The unit is sizing 15.1x10.2x1,6 inches and weights 6 pounds, not exactly easy to be carried while traveling but not such a big problem anyway. The keyboard presents its keys with a little bit of flexibility but there isn’t the feeling of being crammed even if the screen is 15.6” wide there is still room for full number pad located on the right side of the base. With a rough surface the touchpad felt very easy to work with presenting no friction while moving the finger across it.

The screen as mentioned is 15.6” wide with a suitable brightness and a 1366 x 768 resolution that makes it appropriate for its size, but in order to get good viewing angles you have to tilt back the display further than you normally do, otherwise you get a washed out image on the screen. The speakers play loud enough yet are lacking the bass line.

On the right side of the unit we find 2 USB ports, modem, a Kensington lock slot and on the left a VGA out, Ethernet, headphone and microphone, and an eSATA port that doubles a USB. The webcam is a 1.3 megapixel one and has a little motion blur while you make a move being two feet away from the webcam. The system is equipped with 2.0-GHz Intel Premium T4200 processor scoring 2,791 in PCMark Vantage which is 400 points below the category average but with 100 points above the Dell Inspiron 15 score which has the same processor and amount of RAM – 3GB.

The graphics presents itself below the mainstream notebook category average, but when performing less graphically demanding activities it did well enough. The 6-cell battery on Toshiba Satellite L505 lasted 2 hours and 14 minutes, not such a long life compared to that of Dell Inspiron 15, which is one hour longer. The eco utility is accessed through the Power Options menu enabling the display to diminish and turn off the hard disk after 5 minutes of inactivity.

Software comes with an amount of trialware that includes 30 days for Norton Internet Security 2009, 60 days for Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007. For the L500 series, Toshiba offers various configurations such as AMD Athlon X2 QL-65 CPU, 3GB of RAM, a 250GB, 5,400-rpm hard drive for the base model L505D-S5965 and 2.1-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T6500 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 5,400 rpm, 320GB hard drive, and 802.11n Wi-Fi for L505-S6959 model.

Toshiba Satellite L505-S5966 meets the users’ basic demands and paying $549 seems to be quite a deal considering its stylish design and its large hard drive of 320GB, so don’t hesitate to consider it among your options when you are out there in purchase of a good notebook.