Review: The Toshiba Satellite A300D – A Comet or a Falling Star?

Overview

The Toshiba Satellite A300D is the latest offering from the well known laptop manufacturer, Toshiba. I was lucky enough to get my hands on one of these laptops to try out, thanks to www.talktoshiba.com. So without further ado and chessy as it might sound, does this laptop fly through the cosmos like a comet, or does it fall to earth with a bang? Read on to find out more

Review

Style

When I unpacked this laptop I was greeted with a very smart and shiny looking laptop. It seemed to weigh the average weight of most laptops of its size and when you flick open the lid you are very surprised not to find any catch keeping this laptop shut. Now this isn’t a fault but part of the design feature, which I am still puzzled about. After shaking it up-side-down it managed to stay shut, I could not find an explanation to this but I did think that it was a very nice improvement for the laptop market.

Upon examining the keyboard layout of this laptop I was again surprised to see a rather different keyboard style to what I am used to from a laptop. Gone is the traditional larger ‘Enter’ key, which is instead replaced with a slimmer and sexier key. To get over the change I thought I would have a go at ‘type miming’, which made my girlfriend think I had lost the plot and persuaded me to stop the silliness and turn the laptop on. However, like any self confessing stubborn man I ignored her concerns and played around with the keys in which I found extremely smooth and comfortable.

The mouse pad is a different story, which I didn’t like at all. It might be that I am used to knowing my boundaries on a mouse pad and often if I go too far I hit the ridge, however on this laptop the whole thing is totally smooth and I would often find myself wondering why the mouse was not moving only to realise that my finger was on the other side of the laptop.

The screen is a rather nice affair, with it being not to small or not to large it was indeed a pleasure to look at and when I turned it on I was greeting with a nice bright screen that did not seem to have any problem displaying the picture to me no matter what angle I had it at.

Finally the just below the screen is the speaker which is a lovely feature of this laptop, as you will not have to worry about blocking the speakers anymore as they are clearly defined and are a pleasing addition to the laptop.

It actually looks like the laptop is fitted with a heavy duty sound system and when I got around to testing the sound I was surprised to find that my above guess about the sound system may nearly have proved to be true, the sound was clear and crisp, even at a high level (believe me it was a high level) my girlfriend’s Trance music collection could be heard for even the neighbours to get annoyed at.

Under the bonnet

Powered by a dual core AMD Turion 64-bit processor that runs at 2.2GHz (remember to multiply this number by 2) this is AMD’s mobile version of its processor, and as such you should not expect to get the same performance as its more powerful desktop companion, but you will get much more battery life from this processor than you would from the other processor if it was placed inside a laptop.

Now this is the first thing that struck me as odd, they have placed a 64-bit processor into a laptop that is installed with a 32-bit operating system and as such would then only use 32-bit technology which as you may or may not know could effect the performance of this laptop from the moment the operating system is booted up, which I am unfortunate to say is Vista, but more on that later.

Coupled with the processor is a very average 2GB of DDR2 RAM but when you factor in that this laptop is using Vista Home Premium the laptop only gets to use 1GB if not a little more of the RAM at the time of turning your machine on for the first time, so after you install all the various software this will mean that the laptop will be running on less than this (which is my main grudge regarding Vista)

Graphics wise, this laptop uses a ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 with 256MB of RAM which is a supped up version of the 3450 that comes with DirectX 10.1 support. Although this laptop has a far better graphics card than most laptops out on the market it is by no stretch of the imagination the best, because for all the hard-core gamers don't be expecting to play Crysis on this at high quality. Instead it will just about manage to run these games on low quality settings…but whose complaining?!

To test it, I ran The Lord Of The Rings Online on this laptop and was only able to get it to run at medium/high quality (I fiddled with the settings a bit) but I could not run the DirectX 10 features of this game on it unless I wanted to play in slow-mo.

I then thought it was time I put this laptop through its paces, so I installed 3DMark 06 on this laptop. The 3D Mark I got was 1951 which is not a bad score for a laptop, the SM 2.0 score was 644, SM 3.0 scored a 788 while the CPU came to a score of 1586.

Advanced features aside, I then thought I would test out the laptops built-in web cam. It’s a rather nice camera as there were no problems with light detection, the image was always just right with no blinding flashes of light, the camera position on the laptop was perfect so that your face is always on the centre of the screen and the in-built microphone made talking to people a breeze.

This laptop makes worrying about hard disc space non existent as it comes with a very nice 300GB in total, making plenty of space for all those music and video files.

The Gaj-It Verdict

Design 9/10
Usability: 8/10
Features: 9/10
Value: 8/10

We Say

This is a strong contender for a gaming laptop, my advice would be to either install Windows XP 64 or install more RAM to get the full benefits of this laptop, otherwise Vista will drag this laptop down, making it look like a spoilt child. This is a smart looking laptop that will make you look the business when you're out and about.

Technical Specs

• AMD Turion(tm) 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-64 (2 CPUs), ~2.2GHz
• 2GB RAM
• ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 with 256MB RAM
• Conexant High Definition SmartAudio 221
• 300GB Hard Drive Space
• In-Built WebCam 1.3 MegaPixel and Microphone
• DVD Writer
• 15.4″ TruBrite WXGA TFT High Brightness display
• Firewire

Shop For It

Compare on Kelkoo