| Product: |
Toshiba Satellite Pro M30 |
| Date: |
10.02.08 (432 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Cheap, nice screen, decent preloaded software
Disadvantages: battery could be better, card reader eats cards!
The Toshiba Satellite M30 is a great laptop for business users. It has a good standard specification as well as a smart exterior making it top of the heap in the ever expanding choice of laptops.
Looks
For a computer the Toshiba laptop is quite a looker, the case is a stylish silver surrounding the keyboard and back of the screen. The lid of the laptop is matching silver and has the Toshiba logo in the centre. The keyboard and plastic surrounding the screen is black which contrasts nicely with the silver and looks very smart. The screen has a glossy appearance and is very reflective as well as being very thin so the laptop when closed is quite discreet. When switched on the Power button glows an electric blue which looks very nice. You'd have to try quite hard to find a better looking machine.
Layout
The laptop layout is pretty standard at the bottom right and left you have the two speakers, the touchpad with two buttons for left click and right click is located in the centre. Further up you have the keyboard, the only problem I have with it is that it is not a full keyboard, but many laptops are like this with only very large and expensive machines providing a full keyboard. To the right hand side of the laptop you have the power button and CD controls which are quite handy when you are listening to music. On the right side of the laptop you have a USB port, card reader and the switch to activate the built in Wi-Fi. On the left you have the DVD RW drive.
Features & Performance
The laptop hardware is pretty decent featuring an Intel Centrino 1.4GHZ Processor. Intel Centrino is a power saving version chip which is able to reduce its speed when it's not required improving battery life but providing performance when it's needed. Memory is 1GB of RAM which is more than enough for Windows applications and some video games. The hard drive is 60GB which is more than enough for most people's documents, photos and software. If you have copious amounts of data you may wish to get an external hard drive. The laptop also features a built in DVD burner which is perfect for creating your own home movies as well as watching DVD movies. The screen is a 15.4 widescreen affair which has a resolution of 1280x800.
The laptop is preloaded with Windows XP Home, at the time this machine was released Vista wasn't available so don't expect it to come with the newer OS. The machine is capable of running XP with all the appearance enhancing features on. It features some handy Toshiba software as standard including a CD drive silencer to keep the noise levels down when you are using a CD, a handy touchpad utility which brings up a menu featuring your documents, desktop or internet favourites depending on where you press and speaker management software for the SRS WOW sound. Also preloaded is a copy of Microsoft OneNote 2003.
We have installed a copy of Microsoft Office 2003 on the laptop which it runs well. The screen is perfect for viewing spreadsheets and word documents. Performance wise all aspects of the Office software run well but you can sometimes get minor delays in opening the programs the first time if you have just booted the machine. I have also tried Open Office on this machine which runs with no issues.
If you want to relax with some video games this laptop may not be for you. The graphics chip is an Intel GMA which is integrated borrowing the laptops own RAM to use as video memory. If you want to play Crysis, this machine is obviously not going to be for you. If however you are content with older games (anything pre 2000) you should be fine. If you enjoy internet flash games you will be pleased to know they run very well as do MSN messenger games. If you have children's learning software/games they should run well on this machine as they generally have very low requirements.
The laptop comes with no DVD authoring software so if you want to make your own movies you will have to purchase a program such as Nero. Nero runs well on the machine and you can generally make your own movie in around 1-2 hours. This may seem like a while but bear in mind it has to encode it for your DVD player; this process can take much longer on a slower machine. As for DVD playback the laptop is well suited to this as it has a widescreen display, which is very clear and makes DVDs look great, as well as SRS WOW speakers, which aren't the best but for a machine this size they're good.
The laptop has good connectivity featuring 3 USB 2.0 ports for connecting devices such as printers and scanners, two located on the back and one on the side, if you have many devices to plug in this isn't enough and you may have to purchase an external USB adaptor. To connect to the Internet you have two options you can either use the ethernet input, or you can go wireless as the laptop has built in Wi-Fi (though to use Wi-Fi you must have a wireless compatible access point nearby). To easily access photos and media stored on memory cards it has a built in card reader, this is good and generally works well, I have had some trouble with this as it has no eject feature and you have to pry the card out with your fingers, SD cards are particularly difficult to remove as they are small and I have had to resort to a small pair of pliers! The battery in the laptop is reasonable and if you don't use the Wi-Fi you can use it for up to about three hours. If you're always on the go you may want to upgrade to a higher capacity battery.
Price
This laptop cost £499 two years ago, now the prices for a machine like this have come way down. If you were to find one now you'd probably have to look somewhere like eBay expect to pay from £150-200, if you're on a budget and require basic functionality and portability this machine would be ideal for you.
Summary: A great laptop perfect for browsing the net, using MS Office and playing DVDs.
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