Toshiba Satellite A70
Desktop replacement Windows notebook for business
travelers.
By Jon Deragon,
Visca Consulting
Wednesday September 22, 2004; 1:44am EST
Many business users these days are making the migration from the
desktop to a notebook desktop replacement. With the latest
generation of mid to high range notebooks offering performance and
features rivaling desktops; continually plummeting prices; and the
convenience of no longer having to synchronize between your mobile
and desktop - it makes more sense then ever to switch to a notebook.
A desktop
replacement that fits the bill of being feature rich, with desktop
comparable performance at an economical price point is the new
Toshiba Satellite A70 notebook. Coming in at approximately $1700USD,
it is amazing what they pack into this unit to make your life easier
at the office, home or on the road.
The Toshiba A70 out
of the box includes all the usual items; instruction manuals, backup
software CD's, power adaptor and of course the notebook. The
exterior of the A70 is attractive with a beautiful deep blue top
accented with a silver Toshiba logo. The base is black with enlarged
rubber feet for good traction and clearance from the working
surface. Opening the notebook reveals a minimalist design with
prominent widescreen 15.4" screen with dark bezel, light grey
working surface featuring keyboard with power and CD controls to
left, touchpad in center front and small circular speaker grills on
either front corners. The lock and hinge mechanisms for opening and
closing the notebook perform well and allow easy positioning of the
monitor. Notebook weight is typical, if not slightly on the heavy
side.
Starting up the
notebook with the conveniently placed and informative multicolored
lighting power button gets the notebook going relatively quickly.
Loading the pre-installed Windows XP Home edition is at a decent
pace but by no means extraordinary in speed. Once up and running we
found the pre-loaded software the usual fare of lite and trial ware
software such as CD burning software, antivirus, utilities specific
to the proprietary software built into the notebook. The included
Microsoft One Note is alright, but something more useful like
Outlook or a productivity suite would have been preferable. Many
users would feel the included software to be "limited" so be
prepared to spend additional money for things such as utilities and
applications. Otherwise, the configuration is for the most part
uncluttered and should serve the purpose for most users with a bit
of cleaning up (read, an afternoon of cleaning up a plethora of
desktop icons and rearranging start menus). Once you're more settled
in and using applications on the A70, load times seem somewhat slow
for many applications, but application performance once loaded is
without any problems and everything is smooth even with multiple
heavy applications loaded at a time.
The notebook starts
up with a whirl of fan noise, settling down seconds later to near
silent operation. Occasionally interrupted with a slight fan noise
clearing out any heat build up. It's generally an exceptionally
quiet machine to work with. The keyboard is definitely nothing to
marvel at. Key feedback is somewhat lacking, some keys squeak over
extended use, placement of a limited number of keys is lacking, and
the keys feel thin and slightly 'wobbly'. The touchpad works well
with good mouse pointer tracking and the ability to customize
specific touchpad uses to activate commands. However, the touchpad
buttons feel somewhat indecisive and lacking in solid feedback. The
power button has a circular clear part which indicates the notebooks
power status by its color. A cool blue for regular operation or a
fading amber for hibernation. Below the power button are the hard
drive and CD operation indicator lights and a set of CD operation
controls such as play, stop, forward and back. Volume buttons would
have been better than the rotary style volume on the right of the
case.
Key status such as
Caps Lock is indicated with a light at the specific key, and long
the front of the notebook are the AC, power and battery indicator
lights. The left of the case features a multi-format memory card
reader, an excellent convenience feature that is commended; PCMCIA
card slot, IEEE port and CD/DVD drive. The right features
volume control, headphone and microphone port (the lack of built in
microphone is disappointing), 1 USB2.0 port and the wireless on/off
switch. The back features 2 additional USB2.0 ports, networking
(10/100 Ethernet LAN) and
modem (V.92/56K) jacks, parallel port, mouse port, power plug and heat vents.
Specification wise,
the Toshiba A70 has a solid set of features. An Intel Pentium 4 2.8
processor keeps things rolling along at a decent pace; its 512MB DDR
memory is perfect; 802.11b/g wireless built-in; dedicated ATI Radeon
9000 graphics; CD-RW/DVD-RAM drive, and the 40GB hard drive is not
exactly generous, but certainly sufficient.
The widescreen
15.4" 1280x800 TFT active-matrix screen is simply a joy to work
with, its bright, crisp, colorful and has an excellent viewing angle
range. Its light distribution is uniform and the colors are rich and
animated. Refresh rates were not a problem, nor was glare. The
widescreen is also no gimmick. When using tools that require extra
space for tool docks and other objects on the screen (example,
graphics design software), that extra
width is a great place to put it all so that it doesn't obstruct
what you are doing. The graphics card is also able to handle pretty
much anything you can throw at it within exception to demanding
games and other high-end video applications. ATI drivers are great to have,
highly customizable and allow you to set the amount of shared
resources they use from 16mb (default is 64mb) to 128mb. Built-in
CD-RW/DVD-RAM drive function well, with little noise (which is
actually configurable with an included utility), and easy disc
loading and removal. The wireless functionality worked well picking
up local are wireless routers without difficulty and connecting to
them with relative ease. Having the physical wireless on / off
switch is a nice addition.
The built-in
speakers were truly a severe disappointment. They are completely and
utterly useless, only barely handling the absolute basic needs of using
Windows. There is absolutely no music fidelity, volume, depth and
quite frankly they sound distorted and totally underpowered for any
real world use. For music listening or gaming it is pretty much a
requirement to use external speakers or headphones. This is a shame
because we have heard much better from lower cost notebooks.
The Toshiba A70 is
available at most electronics retails and computer stores. The
notebook retails at $1699CAD, but can usually be found with
discounted pricing. It includes 1 year (back to the factory) warranty which
is definitely nothing to sing about, 2 or 3 years would have been more
reassuring, as well as on-site service.
Over prolonged use
of the notebook, the Toshiba A70 was generally a comfortable
computer to use. The incredible widescreen, fast processor and
generous memory are certainly the Toshiba A70's strong points. You
really do get quite a bit of bang for the buck. There are some small
build quality points which would have been nice if Toshiba
addressed, especially for a notebook in this price bracket. But
overall it is certainly a competent notebook that overall fares
well, if not favorably, when compared to some of its direct competitors.
PROS - Beautifully crisp and clear widescreen; dedicated ATI
Radeon graphics; multi-format memory card reader convenience;
generous memory and solid processor specification, built-in
wireless.
CONS - Absolutely terrible built-in speakers; average keyboard
and touchpad buttons; less than stellar hard drive performance and
size; more USB2.0 ports would have been good; somewhat on the heavy
side, limited warranty.
About The Author
Jon Deragon is president and founder of Visca Consulting, a firm
specializing in web site design, development and usability for
businesses of all sizes. His many years in the technology industry has
enabled him to write quality, in-depth product reviews to assist
businesses make more informed technology purchases. He welcomes any
questions or comments you may have regarding his company's services,
this review or interest in having your company's products reviewed.
info@viscaconsulting.com
http://www.viscaconsulting.com/
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