toshiba satellite a70 laptop,toshiba pa3383u-1brs laptop battery review
Satellite A70 Design
The Satellite A70/75 series offers the lowest price of Toshiba's 2004 back-to-school laptops, but by no means does this mainstream laptop look cheap. In fact, this solid system includes some bells and whistles, such as a wide 15.4-inch display and dedicated CD-control buttons, typically found on more expensive laptops. We tested the Toshiba Satellite A75-S206, whose mobile Pentium 4 processor rocked CNET Labs' benchmarks. Unfortunately, our Labs' battery-drain tests revealed less exciting news: the Satellite A75-S206's battery cut out more than 2 hours sooner than the mainstream Dell Inspiron 1150's. If you value very long battery life at minimal cost, Dell's Inspiron 1150 is a great catch. If speed and screen space are your top priorities, go with the Satellite A75-S206 instead. (Note: The Toshiba Satellite A70 and A75 are basically the same system; you can customize the A70, while A75 models come preconfigured.)
This seems to be a very well made computer. After several weeks of use, it have had no problems. The casing is made of a combination of plastic and metal. It has two sturdy hinges holding the display to the main body. Two fans mounted on the bottom of the machine and air vents at the rear provide adequate cooling with no signs of overheating. While wearing shorts, you can have the laptop resting on my legs and experienced just a wee bit of discomfort.
The Satellite A70 weighs in at 7.98 pounds without the power adapter. To me this isn't as heavy as it sounds, although you wouldn't want to carry this with a single hand and you'd probably get tired carrying it around all day in a case or backpack. You must remember that this is a desktop replacement system and therefore is not designed to be lightweight. Also, the size of the power adapter is quite large -- not unlike a small brick! The power adapter can become quite hot whilst charging too.
Screen, Keyboard, Touchpad and Speakers
The screen is very nice, bright, crisp, and clear. it is fortunate enough to have no dead pixels on my screen. Via function keys the brightness can be set at one of 8 levels. The widescreen is a nice look. The maximum resolution for the LCD is 1280 x 800, but resolutions up to 2048 x 1356 are supported for external monitors. The LCD's refresh rate is fixed at 60Hz.
The keyboard is full size and feels smooth and returns a satisfying click when used. The Control key is positioned in the proper place, below the left shift key. There are also dedicated Home, Page up, Page down, End, and Arrow keys. The touchpad features a scrolling ability like a wheel mouse both vertically and horizontally. Sliding your finger along the right or bottom extremity of the pad activates this. If you use an external mouse, the touchpad is easily deactivated by hitting FN + F9. An annoyance with the touchpad is that, unlike the HP machine, the right and bottom extremities are not highlighted with a scroll line that straightaway tells a user about the sliding feature. There are plenty of areas where Toshiba could have made the finish or user friendliness detailing. In fact, when compared to the HP machine I bought earlier, the user friendliness of buttons and forcing functions (such as arrows on the touchpad to indicate the scroll area) is abysmal. For a machine this expensive I would have liked to have seen the keyboard with backlighting or overhead light such as you get on the IBM ThinkPad. It's just hard to see the keys when using the machine in the dark.
There are several buttons located to the left of the keyboard. Topmost is the power button. Immediately below that are two indicator lights, the left being for hard drive access. The right light is associated with the configurable button located directly below it. By default, the configurable button launches Windows Media player, but this can be changed to any program you want. Underneath this there are 4 buttons for play/pause, stop, next and previous tracks. These buttons work with the Intervideo Win DVD movie player and Windows Media Player.
software
The Satellite A70 comes preinstalled with Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition. The software is quite measly and you are provided with only MS One Note software, CD burning software, Intervideo Win DVD, a 90-day subscription to Norton antivirus, and Toshiba utilities.
I had to load, post purchase, the following software --
- Microsoft Office 2004 Professional.
- DVD Shrink
- Real Player
- QuickTime player
However, to be fair Toshiba does include some neat utilities, such as Touch and Launch. With this utility, a user can briefly touch a corner of the touchpad to get a translucent screen
Poor!! It is lucky if you are able to squeeze 2 hours and 10 minutes. It is usually about 2-hours before the battery kicks the bucket. This is despite setting to the lowest the power profiles, which are part of Toshiba's power management utility. This utility allows the user to configure various power profiles exactly how they want them, right down to processor speed. it origanal battery code:toshiba pa3383u-1brs battery, it can also replacement for PA3216U-1BRS
No comments:
Post a Comment