I first started investigating laptops in August as I wanted to take a laptop with me to university. My main requirements was that it was to be fast enough to handle most programs so that it doesn't leave me sitting around waiting to take notes or finish a task as well as remaining portable and more importantly good value for money. I am interested in computers and am doing a computer based course, so I thought I would have to budget form around £600 - £800 for a good performing laptop, as I was going on what my friends had paid for their laptops. I was also aware that after researching a bit on the internet, I found that when you buy a laptop its important that its from a good manufacturer e.g. Acer's apparently are unreliable, Compaq's are slow performing and Sony's tend to be out of most peoples price range. However Toshiba was the one brand that I had heard nothing but praise for, whether it was their reliability, good value, high build quality and good battery performance. So I carried on researching for about 3 weeks as it was a major purchase for me to go to university with, as my student budget hardly stretches over the necessities as it is. I found myself eliminating a lot of the manufacturers from my comparisons due to reliability issues and general feel of the laptops for example a HP laptop's touchpad just doesn't feel right to me, it feels cheap and sticky, it's a personal opinion but it's a laptop so the user is stuck using the peripherals installed on it e.g. touchpad and keyboard. I was aware that the best deals are to be had online, and thought I'd settle on a Toshiba, preferably one from the Satellite range, as they seem to be the good performance ones with the good value. After going through the specifications on the Toshiba website, which I might add is very easy to compare the differences between their laptops and is really quite helpful, I settled on an A200 series, as the new A210 series is based on AMD's processors and currently Intel's processors (CPU's) are a lot better at power management, thus give a longer battery life. This is the only difference between the A200 and A210 series.

After comparing them all on the Toshiba website I found that the A200-195 was the best for me, as it offered a good sized hard drive, 120GB, quite large in comparison to other manufacturers' laptops, the general range seemed to be about 80GB. The processor was a 1.76GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo, this is important as it is a Core 2, this processor is the new one from Intel which is less demanding of the battery for better performance so it is a must in a laptop, again I was surprised to find that hardly any of the other laptops had Core 2's, until you got to the £900 price ranges, hence the battery life on the Toshiba was sold as 3 to 4 hours and the other laptops based on the Core 1 was 1.5 to 2 hours. There is 2GB of DDR2 RAM inside the 195 as well, which is impressive as that's more than most desktop pc's come with nowadays, I only could find some laptops which matched this, and again they were a higher price. The graphics card inside is the only let down of the system, it is an integrated graphics card, which means it isn't a PCI or PCI express card which obviously has its disadvantages, namely it won't be able to play games in as high a resolution as some of the other computers, however to get a decent graphics card inside a laptop the price range immediately starts at £800, which is out of my price range. There is also the issue on a big graphics card draining power from the battery which is a known problem, so I am happy with the integrated graphics card and to be honest I play games on it quite a lot and it's not bad at all.

The laptop came pre loaded with Vista Home Premium, which I am now happy to be using, as it offers more features on a laptop than XP does, e.g. it automatically switches profiles to get the best out of your battery e.g. slows performance when its not needed, powers down wireless strength to enable you to still use wireless but it just doesn't sap all the power. All together it's a very smart operating system, and when partnered with the very smart Toshiba A200-195 it's impressive.

In short, I think this laptop is one of the best on the market as a general high performance but affordable laptop which ticks all the right boxes. I would recommend this laptop to everyone. The only drawbacks are that it does not have Bluetooth connectivity, which can be rectified by a £10 USB dongle off the internet. It also does not have a built in webcam, which is acceptable to me as I would rather connect one when I need it than make the laptop larger when I don't want to use it, as the webcam is integrated above the screen, making the lid larger. As I mentioned before it doesn't have a standalone graphics card, so the performance on some of the new games won't be as good as the more expensive laptops, but I question why anyone would play games on a laptop as most gamers use desktops because they can have a seriously high performance computer and a large screen. I think this is one of the best laptops from the best laptop manufacturer, Toshiba.