Toshiba Satellite M50-130 review

Verdict:

The Satellite is the most expensive notebook here, and the cheaper Gateway is more powerful. Its battery is also disappointing. However, its excellent keyboard, graphics processor and handy multimedia features are definite plus points

Review Date: 19 Dec 2005

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

The Toshiba is very compact and stylish. Its widescreen display and media capabilities make it a good choice for home entertainment.

FEATURES

The Toshiba's solid chassis is wide but not very deep. This is due to its 1,280x768 widescreen display. The keyboard is the best in this group, with plenty of travel and good tactile feedback. Bluetooth is also included.

To the right of the keyboard are DVD and CD controls. The notebook can play both without booting into Windows. The software is well designed and DVD playback looks good on the widescreen display.

The display's gloss coating improves contrast, but colours lacked vibrancy and we could see graininess in white areas. It's OK, but not as good as we'd hoped.

PERFORMANCE

The Satellite scored well in our application benchmarks. Its score of 86 overall was marginally better than those of the other notebooks with 512MB of RAM, and just behind the Gateway MX6635b. Its battery is one of the worst in the group, though, and lasted just 139 minutes in our low-usage test. It couldn't play a two-hour DVD on one battery charge.

This is one of just two notebooks in the group with a dedicated 3D graphics processor. Its Radeon X600SE chip isn't as powerful as Evesham's GeForce Go 6600, but it ran Doom 3 at over 30fps in medium quality at 800x600. It's not good enough for keen gamers, but powerful enough for the odd round of virtual golf.

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