The laptop was bought at around Christmas time as my old one broke. The biggest reason for choosing this particular laptop was because of the 17.1" widescreen, at a reasonable price. When comparing prices for larger screened laptops, you will see that the price for this once is very reasonable for its spec.
The laptop is light for its size, especially when compared with my old widescreen laptop. This makes it portable, this coupled with the wireless connectivity allow it to be used anywhere in the house. There are 6 USB ports, 2 on one side and 4 on the other. Along with this there is a HDMI connection, firewire, VGA & S-Video port, LAN and Dial-Up ports, multiple sound connections and a memory card reader. The sound is controlled by a little wheel on the front along with the standard windows control. The wireless is also controlled by a little switch located on the front of the laptop.
The screen is very good; you can see it reasonably easy to see even when in bright sunlight which means it is easy to work outside in the sun. With Vista being pre-installed on it, the graphics look amazing, and the widescreen allow for multiple windows to be vied at once at a reasonable size.
With the laptop having 2GB of RAM, it means that it is a little bit slow when trying to run more demanding applications on top of the Vista operating system. Although saying this, it is upgradable to 4GB which should be enough to cope with a lot of programs.
The graphics card is also quite reasonable. It is capable of running the Crysis game, although at a very low level of detail, it is still possible to play it with a little patience. It also allows users to connect another monitor either through the VGA or HDMI, and gives multiple options once one is connected.
There is a HD-DVD drive built in because Toshiba was a company responsible for creating these disks, but they did not take off and a Blu-Ray drive would have been a better option. But it still works in all the normal ways that a DVD-ROM driver would and plays all DVDs and CDs.
There is a dual core processor located inside which helps to run the Vista operating system, but at times it is very slow. This is generally the case when there are multiple windows open. But saying this, it can handle most tasks very easily and quickly e.g. opening and using Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.
The overall design of the laptop I would say is very good. With the addition of Harman/Lardon speakers it means that it has excellent sound quality when playing music, videos, etc. It is also helped with neatly placed media controls at the top of the laptop. It is a very good laptop for the price, but the only thing that is letting it down is the amount of RAM, but this is upgradable, so it doesn't really matter.
I would definitely recommend this laptop to potential buyers, although it has a HD-DVD drive, which no longer has any appeal but because it plays normal disks it doesn't make a difference.
Pictures of Toshiba Satellite P200-155
Showing HDMI, VGA, S-Video, Firewire, Express Card Slot, 2 x USB ports, and Ethernet port.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
(+) cool and quite robust trackpad, good display,64-bit windows 7 (-) few connectors,dell drivers only, not realy for gameing (most models), finger print prone!
Jun 9th, 2008
very helpful by (100%):
