Toshiba Satellite P200-1EE review

There are no ugly ducklings in this Labs, but the Satellite P200-1EE looks particularly smart.

There's no shortage of connections, with six USB2 ports, FireWire and HDMI, and there's even room inside for a second hard disk if the relatively meagre 160GB one fills up.

The high-quality speakers and row of audio controls show that this is a laptop built for entertainment. The 17in widescreen display's 1,440x900-pixel resolution is perfect for high-definition video played from the internal HD DVD drive. It's good you're not paying a premium for the HD DVD drive, as HD DVD is now officially dead so any future films won't be released on the format.

The screen's colour accuracy could be better. It's certainly bright, but light areas are overexposed and colours are a bit washed out. The ATI graphics driver let us lower the Gamma setting to restore lost vibrancy and highlight detail, but at the expense of shadow detail. Few people will find this a serious problem in general use, but it does mean that the P200-1EE isn't ideally suited to photo editing. The keyboard has a positive, clicky action and an excellent layout, except for the Enter key, which is skinny. The touch pad is responsive and accurate, but the integrated webcam produced grainier video than the others here.

Battery life is the best of the 17in laptops, surviving for 2 hours in our light-use test. The 3.3kg weight is lower than the others, too, but while Toshiba includes a case, we can't imagine taking this laptop on regular travels.

The 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo T5250 is fine for business software, the web and multimedia entertainment, but those with other aspirations would benefit from something faster. Games performance is up there with the best, with the Radeon HD2600 helping to achieve 20fps in Call of Duty 2.

Toshiba's Satellite P200-1EE is a competent laptop, but it has an unimpressive screen and mediocre Windows performance. Asus's F7Sr is a better desktop-replacement laptop.