Review: Toshiba Satellite Pro A120

The engineers at Toshiba must have been having internal battles with themselves while they were designing the Satellite Pro, as the machine seems to swing back and forth between an almost schizophrenic mixture of strengths and weaknesses.

Let’s try and start on a positive note, though, and point at the Satellite’s impressive battery life. If you want to watch some DVDs on the move, then you’ll be able to keep going for a full two and a half hours before the battery gives up the ghost.

That DVD playback score is matched only by the Amilo from Fujitsu-Siemens, and even the Amilo takes second place to the Satellite’s three and a half hours of battery life when running business productivity software.

Toshiba can always be relied on to provide high-quality displays too, and the Satellite’s 15.4in screen is great for watching movies (some people may also prefer the matte finish of the screen to the glossy screens found on most of these laptops).

The Satellite is quite solidly built – an area where machines such as the Amilo and MSI Megabook don’t fare quite so well. The screen panel seems sturdy enough to protect the screen from a bit of mishandling, and the hard disk has a protective mechanism that automatically locks the disk if the laptop receives a sudden jolt. Even if you drop the computer and damage other parts, such as the screen, you should still be able to retrieve important files from the hard disk.

Processor performance is also quite respectable – despite the initially disappointing choice of an Intel Core Solo processor. Obviously, a Core Solo processor isn’t going to match the performance of a Core Duo processor, but Toshiba has at least opted for a processor with a fairly respectable clock speed – 1.86GHz, compared with the 1.66GHz Core Duo used by the Amilo.

That extra bit of clock speed actually means that the Satellite produces some quite reasonable performance results. Under normal circumstances we’d happily recommend it to most home users for a wide range of tasks, even a bit of video editing.

This, however, is where the Satellite’s bad side starts to come to the fore. We thought it was a misprint when we saw that the Satellite only had 256MB of Ram, but this does indeed turn out to be true. That’s an inadequate amount of memory for any machine running Windows XP – we don’t care how cheap it is, and it’s totally inadequate if you’re contemplating an upgrade to Windows Vista at some stage.

Things are made even worse when you realise that the integrated Intel GMA950 graphics chips shares some of the system memory for graphics. Needless to say, the Satellite’s 3D performance is the poorest in this group. To make things worse, the hard disk is a meagre 40GB; we’ve reviewed mp3 players that are bigger than that.

To be fair, the lack of memory is easily rectified without having to spend too much money. Besides, the Satellite does come in at less than £470, so you’ll still have some change from £500 to go towards the extra Ram.

It’s certainly tempting, given the machine’s overall build quality and that impressive battery life. It’s just a shame that Toshiba couldn’t manage even a modest 512MB configuration and a decent size hard disk as part of the Satellite’s standard configuration.

This review is part of a group test of budget laptops. See also:
Introduction
Acer Aspire 5101 AWLMi
Asus A6Rp-AP026H
Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505
Hi-grade Notino W5600
MSI Megabook M670
Graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf downlaods above.

Group test: Hi-grade Notino W5600

The Hi-grade is a good all-round performer but the processor lets it down  22 Dec 2006

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