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Toshiba’s Tecra M10-10i is a business laptop, so it comes preinstalled with Vista Business and has a fingerprint reader and smartcard slot. There’s even a serial port and CardBus slot for connecting older peripherals, which could be useful. As with most business laptops, the collect-and-return warranty lasts three years, which is two years longer than most of the models here. The chunky case weighs 2.6kg, which is heavier than usual for a 14in laptop. Its battery lasted almost four hours in our tests. For cursor control, you get both a touchstick and touchpad. The touchstick’s spongy buttons don’t give enough feedback when pressed, but the touchpad’s buttons feel firmer. We loved the large and responsive keyboard, though. It’s very comfortable to type on and is one of the best of any laptop here. The 14in screen’s matt finish means it’s not as bright as most glossy screens, but it’s by no means dim and text remains perfectly legible when brightness is reduced to conserve battery life. Viewing angles are fairly tight and whites aren’t particularly pure, but these are minor quibbles. The 1,440×900-pixel resolution is large for a 14in display, and is better than 1,280×800 screens when you need to edit Excel spreadsheets, for example. As expected, the Tecra’s integrated Intel graphics chip isn’t powerful enough for gaming, but it fared well in our Windows benchmarks. Its 3GB of RAM and 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 processor did particularly well in our multitasking test. The 250GB hard disk is a little small at this price, but is more than enough for storing lots of office documents. Bluetooth, Draft-N WiFi and Gigabit Ethernet are built in, but there’s no webcam, so you’ll have to buy an external USB camera if you want to use Skype or Windows Messenger for video chats. The memory card reader, which supports SDHC and Memory Stick, is always a welcome inclusion.
The Tecra is a good buy if you want its lengthy warranty or business features. If you don’t, the other more generously specified laptops here are better value.
