Toshiba Portege A100 review

Toshiba's Portege A100 unashamedly borrows its looks from the Apple iBook. And why not? Apple has shown that when it comes to notebooks, users want style.

The A100 has a pearl-white lid made of thick plastic. Good-looking and functional, it provides sturdy support for the screen. The bottom half of the machine is brushed silver. Opening the notebook revealed a nice touch: a light behind the power button glows blue when the machine is on, orange when it is switched off and green when on standby. There are three programmable hotkeys located above the 85-key keyboard.

The keys are of a good size and pleasant to use. The Backspace key is as large as it would be on a full-sized keyboard, and Toshiba hasn't skimped with the Enter and Shift keys either. We weren't thrilled to find the Windows key shrunk and moved to the top row of the keyboard, though.

There is a full range of connectivity options, with four USB ports, a Secure Digital slot, two Type II PC Card slots and a mini-FireWire port. As this is a Centrino-based machine, wireless networking is included as standard.

The A100 is highly portable, weighing just 2.2kg and measuring 289x238x36mm. It lasted 216 minutes in our battery tests, enough to last all day when running office applications.

To keep the size down, the Portege A100 has a 12.1" screen with a native resolution of 1,024x768 pixels. This isn't the disadvantage it might be in other notebooks. The screen is bright, with a good viewing angle and sharp, clear images. We found it easy on the eyes even after hours of use.

This is not a speedy machine. With a Pentium M 1.4GHz processor and only 256MB of memory, its benchmark results were mediocre. The system is completed with a 40GB hard disk and a combo drive. In SYSmark2004 a score of 93 is mediocre. In 3DMark2001 it managed 1,840 - well below the scores of the other notebooks reviewed this month. The Advent 7049 achieved 8,911, for instance, but has a desktop Pentium 3.06GHz processor.

The Toshiba is not for gamers: its integrated graphics chipset, the Intel 855GM, doesn't even have its own dedicated memory but uses a portion of the system memory. As a result, the A100 scored a miserly 88 in our 3DMark03 graphics test.

However, it's more than fast enough to run any standard office application. If you're after such a compact machine, usability is more important than speed, and here the A100 does extremely well.

Author: Lynley Oram