Absolute Gadget

Review: Toshiba Satellite Pro A300D laptop

Written by Rene Millman Monday, 01 December 2008 22:10

Toshiba has always had some pretty good laptops and has been in the game a good few years for good reason - they work! So would the new Satellite Pro A300D powered by an AMD Puma processor deliver the good?

The unassuming-looking laptop features an AMD Turion X2 Ultra ZM-80 processor running at 2.1GHz for each of the dual cores.

It also has 3GB of system memory (expandable to 8GB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz) while the WXGA screen resolution maxes out at 1,280 by 800 on the 15.4-inch display. It is a reasonably size, measuring 36.3 cm x 26.7 cm x 3.9 cm and weighing 2.7kg.

The display is good and bright enough, it has to be said that this is a business laptop so won't feature the screaming graphical capability that gaming laptops would sport. Also, it has onboard graphics (ATI Radeon 3100 shared video memory) instead of a dedicated grahics chipset.

It has a reasonalby spacious 250GB hard drive, so will be able to take your iTunes folder (hopefully you won't have too many HD movies to store on this).

Sound is about average. Despite the stereo speakers and the Dolby Sound Room technology, we thought that just about performed.

Connectivity-wise, it ticks the boxes with wireless b and g (sadly not n specification), and Gigabit Ethernet. There is also a 5-in-1 card reader and a DVD +/- RW and +/- DL superdrive. There is also a good 1.3-megapixel webcam to make those important internet video calls.

As far as the operating system is concerned, it comes with Windows Vista Business, bu can be downgraded to Windows XP Professional (which is a good idea as Vista Business seems to take forever to load up).

The Lithium-ion battery claimes to give 2.25 hours of life before requiring a charge.

Overall, this laptop is functional rather than exciting and at around £500 is clearly aimed at the business market. Ideally, these types of laptops should be designed to be a lot lighter as most business people have to lug these things around airports and business trips.