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.
The weight of toshiba satellite a70 (original battery code : toshiba pa3383u-1brs ) is not a huge problem . A lot of people prefer the small and lightweight models of notebooks these days, but this one comes in at 7.9 pounds and doesn't cause me any trouble. As a college student, it's about the size and weight of some of my larger books for class. Sitting in my lap it can get a little warm, but not unbearable under normal use with the processor power turned down. If the CPU is set to high it heats up rather quickly and the fans kick on, and their noise is a little annoying after a while, but with good ventilation, it rarely gets hot enough to require much use of the fans.
Screen
The screen is absolutely wonderful. It was a factor in my purchasing this machine as my digital camera battery . 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.
For a mainstream laptop toshiba satellite a75 ( toshiba pa3383u-1brs) 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.
Processor and Performance
The overall speed and performance of the system is quite fast. I never have noticed any serious lagging when loading programs and playing games. Boot up is about as quick as my desktop with similar specs. I am picky when it comes to performance and do not tolerate lagging. The hard drive is 4200 RPM, slow as far as hard drives are considered as a whole, but for notebooks, it is pretty much the standard. Even with being a slower RPM, the seek times are quick and everything loads with haste. The RAM, sadly, is only at 512MB as of now. It is perfectly tolerable, but I plan to upgrade to 1BG as soon as possible, just for my peace of mind. However, I have heard many reports that the extra 512 does not make a world of difference in some machines, but I'll see about that. The games I have run on the A75 so far include Rise of Nations, run at maximum graphics, and Unreal Tournament at max graphics, as well. Both of them run amazingly well. I have not yet tried a high end game such as Doom 3 or Half Life 2, but I seriously doubt that any notebook less than one of those $3000 mega-machines would be able to play them with adequate satisfaction.
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.
Battery
Toshiba pa3383u-1brs Battery (replacement battery code toshiba pa3382u-1bas)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.
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