Toshiba satellite a75 laptop review
I bought the Toshiba Satellite A75 notebook computer for school and other applications as well as gaming. Most people would agree that I should have gone for a Pentium M if I am going to be transporting it to class and could take advantage of the better battery life. I probably would have if I didn't get such a good deal on this one. I snagged it for about $600 less than retail from where I work. The A75 is a desktop replacement style notebook, which is what I wanted, so I jumped on this deal.
The Toshiba Satellite A75 desktop-like build is by no means slim, and it's certainly not pretty, but it packs in some decent multimedia features. The 3.33-GHz Mobile Pentium 4 548 processor, 100GB hard drive, and DVD±RW drive are especially useful for home video editors.
For a mainstream laptop, the Toshiba's array of ports and slots falls right on the money. The laptop's left edge accommodates an infrared port and one Type II PC Card slot. The back edge is home to ports that include one for S-Video out, one VGA, one parallel, a 56Kbps modem, a 10/100 Ethernet, and two USB 2.0 ports; there's a third USB 2.0 port on the right edge, along with a headphone jack, a microphone port, and a couple of handy extras: a wireless on/off switch to conserve battery power and a volume-control wheel. Toshiba's Web site offers the Satellite A75 line in five preconfigured versions; in-store versions may vary. While many mainstream laptop manufacturers take this tack to save cash, the fact that you can't customize your A75 system irks us.
The Satellite A75's five configurations have five different model numbers (our evaluation system was the A75-S206), but they all use many of the same basic components. Each Satellite A75 runs a mobile Pentium 4 processor with Intel's much-hyped Hyper-Threading technology, an average 512MB of memory, and an aging ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 graphics chip that borrows up to 64MB of video RAM from the main memory. Also onboard is a fast Atheros 802.11b/g wireless mini PCI card and a preloaded version of Microsoft's pared-down office suite, Microsoft Works.
Design and Build
The design is fairly sleek as a nice consumer line notebook should be. A nice blue power light sits above some media buttons, it's nothing special but it looks cool. The top (back side of screen) is a slick metallic-looking cobalt color which is nice opposed to some of the standard black, charcoal and magnesium alloy cases. Overall this unit is fairly sturdy. I do not feel like I am going to break it while I'm moving it around and I even twisted the screen lid a bit to test it out, it holds up pretty well. Again, it is a consumer line, not business so it's not quite the rigid metal frames of the expensive ones, but does quite well.
Screen
The screen is absolutely wonderful. It was a factor in my purchasing this machine. A Toshiba Pentium M system with a widescreen TruBrite screen is several thousand dollars more, so this unit was quite appealing. It is always bright enough for me to see, even when I set the brightness down to save battery life. When outdoors, there is a glare on it because of the glossy finish, but it doesn't annoy me because the screen is bright enough to shine through and I never really notice the glare. Indoors, I haven't noticed a glare at all and it is the brightest, most brilliantly colored screen I have yet to see. Absolutely beautiful. I was fortunate in that it has absolutely no dead or partially lit pixels. It is a 15.4" widescreen factory set at 1280x800.
Wireless
Toshiba packages the Atheros Super G 802.11g wireless adapter built in. I love this feature, it is wonderful. It works extremely well, no difficulty and it has a convenient switch on the right side to toggle on/off. Wireless internet is a marvel in its own right. Not that it is a huge deal, but I would rather have one built in as opposed to one in the PC Card slot sticking out. There is no Bluetooth on this model. I have nothing to utilize the technology anyway, so that has no effect on me.
Conclusion
I love the fact that I can get a powerful computer in such a compact package. The screen and the DVD-RW drive are the highlights of the system, as well as having an ATI graphics chip. Overall I love this computer and would recommend it to people who want an excellent desktop replacement. If someone was really looking for battery life, I might have to recommend a similar system, only with a Pentium M instead of Pentium 4. For the price I paid (far less than retail), this computer is amazing. At retail price of over $1400 dollars, it's still a great machine for the money, but it's not quite the steal I got, so it may not seem as worth the money. In conclusion: great machine for all performance needs with adequate battery life, unless doing processor intensive applications. Recommended!
| Notebook | Time to Calculate Pi to 2 Million Digits |
| Toshiba Satellite A75 (3.2GHz Pentium 4) | 1m 57s |
| IBM ThinkPad T43 (1.86GHz Pentium M) | 1m 45s |
| Fujitsu LifeBook N3510 (1.73 GHz Pentium M) | 1m 48s |
| IBM ThinkPad T41 (1.6GHz Pentium M) | 2m 23s |
| Compaq R3000T (Celeron 2.8GHz) | 3m 3s |
| Dell Inspiron 600m (1.6 GHz Pentium M) | 2m 10s |
| Dell Inspiron 8600 (1.7GHz Pentium M) | 2m 28s |
Battery
Battery life is surprisingly decent for a big and powerful desktop replacement. I set the screen to middle level brightness and also set the hard drives and screen to never turn off and left the wireless adapter on. With these settings the system ran for 3 hours even. Toshiba satellite a75 laptop battery detail :
Original Battery code: toshiba pa3383u-1brs
Battery Item : TOSHIBA SATELLITE A75 SERIES Battery
Battery Type :Li-ion
Volt : 14.8V
Capacity : 6600mAh
Color : Black
Net Weight: 737.09 g
Dimension: 217.20 x 61.09 x 20.40 mm
