A Stunning Laptop. (Toshiba Satellite L350-172)

Member Name: Trengot

Product:	Toshiba Satellite L350-172
Date:	11/10/09 (39 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Widescreen, media keys, physical volume control.

Disadvantages: No backup software or driver disks.

I recently bought this laptop to take with me to uni. I probably didn't need such a powerful machine for the basic internet, office and music tasks that I was planning on using it for but it is nice to have them.

The 17" wide screen is impressively clear and large enough for the black stripe at the top and bottom of films (due to different aspect ratios) to be less of a pain. I have never been disappointed by the image shown. All colours are crisp and the contrast for films and videos is perfect.

The dual core processor is powerful enough to cope with almost everything I have thrown at it. Its just a pity that Vista is so heavy and seems to drag it down.

The CD multi-drive works well (although I expect most do) but also has a silent run feature. This slows down the read speed but makes in almost completely inaudible. This is invaluable when watching films etc (when the read speed is not high anyway)

It only comes with 3 USB ports which is enough for most of the time but occasionally I could have done with a couple more. A mouse and a pen drive leave you with one that has to be used between everything else that uses USB interface (almost everything these days).

The media player hotkeys above the keyboard are useful and save changing windows every time you want to pause the music or skip a track but by far and away the most useful addition is the volume control. Not the standard buttons or key combinations of most computers but a rolling wheel on the front of the laptop. It's a simple thing I know but it is much easier to use and makes the use of the computer seem less hassle.

The wide screen also allows the keyboard to have a separate numpad. This saves having to re-type sections of work as you discover that num-lock has been switched on and half the letters are now numbers.

The hard drives come pre-formatted into two equal partitions (that work out to be about 115 Gb). One of these is the windows boot drive and contains software etc and the other is labelled data and is empty except for the recovery info.

This brings me onto one of the downsides of this laptop. Maybe it was just the shop I bought it from (unlikely) but it came with no CDs or drivers. This normally wouldn't be a problem, but I'd like to know that if anything goes wrong I will be able to sort it. The recovery data can be burned onto a disk although I am not sure what this contains or whether it is bootable. Either way, it would have been good to have the peace of mind of a CD or two.

All in all this laptop is and does everything I could expect from it. It runs every program that I've tried and runs them well. I can't say too much about build quality yet as I have only had it a couple of months but nothing has broken yet. The battery life is good. A full charge and doing non-battery draining tasks on power saving mode can lead to a battery lasting 2.5 - 3 hours.

Summary: Does everything and more for the price of one that only does the basics.

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