Toshiba Satellite Pro A10

...without need of hiring a Toshiba engineer to install it like other laptops. Just make sure it is compatible with the laptop and then replace the old one with the new one. Installing is a sinch if you know how to change CPUs on a normal PC. Too bad you can't do the same for the DVD drive and the graphics.

So what do I think about this laptop? It's not ugly, it can take a bit of damage with no problems, can deal with CDs/DVDs fairly ...
...sucks at games, it lacks extras, it doesn't come with 512MB RAM, it's heavy and large to lug around, plus the sound on it is terrible. If it was cheaper it would of been a great newbie's laptop, but at this price you're better off making your own laptop out of a cornflakes box, Blue Peter styley. Bad value for money. Good luck!  ... more

The laptop for newbies everywhere apparently. Tis a shame that it's a little too big to fit inside my trousers (because something else taking up the space, and it isn't my leg) and there are a few issues with it. So how does this laptop, which is from a very respectable company, fair up to in the world of budget laptops? Well obviously you want to know otherwise you wouldn't be reading this review.

The laptop is quite massive and slightly heavier than your average number cruncher, but at least it's aesthetically better than alot of laptops available. The bigness and the clamshell-isk design make it somewhat durable, I've dropped it twice and it's been fine, but I recommend against doing it to your one as mine was accidental. The totally black colour scheme with a small silver framing give it a 'I am a professional laptop respect me or I'll break down on you during your deadline' type of persona. And frankly that's good with me since I don't want people to laugh at how ugly it is.

I wanted to go through the thick manual, but it's in black and white and if I really wanted to read something as uncolourful as this I would buy The Sun and read the centrefold. I did hav a quick glance inside the manual and it's easy enough to read and understand, but they didn't make it interesting enough to warrant 15 minutes of my time.

The keyboard is your standard affair QWERTY with all the laptop special button functions. The keys don't stick and they all work reliably. Nothing new to report then.

The screen is a 14.1" TFT screen, it's clear and bright with a reasonably good viewing angles. But the problem is that you will get dead pixels rather easily with this screen, I kind of pressed my thumb against the upper left corner of the screen when the laptop was going to drop and saved it, but the pressure killed 2 pixels next to each other. Now I get 2 red dots winking at me everytime I switch on the laptop.

The specification for this laptop isn't as fantastic though. For your £550 you get: Intel Celeron 2.2GHz, 256MB DDR RAM, DVD/CD-RW drive, Intel 845M graphics that uses 16MB of your RAM as video memory and a 30GB hard drive. As you can see they are pretty budget components, the graphics will not win any gaming awards, the CPU is only just adequate for office applications, the RAM is skimpy at 256MB when the standard is 512MB, you don't get a DVD-RW drive and that hard drive is smaller than a chimpanzee's whizzer. But hey for this type of money you can't really expect much right? Even the software doesn't stand out much either, it runs Windows XP Home Edition plus you get the restoration CDs and a few cheap utilities and other software. But otherwise there's nothing in the software department that stands out, not even Microsoft Works is included.

I put graphics and CPU to the test by running a very intensive game, Halo. I can report to you that unless you wish to have epileptic fits it is best that you do not use this laptop for any type of modern day gaming, old games that can run on the really old PCs i.e. Pentium 1, are just about the only games I will allow you. The graphics are good for 2D work, but 3D gaming will destroy you, and the same can be said for the CPU.

The DVD/CD-RW drive can read DVDs at 8x and CDs at 24x. It can write to CDs at 24x and re-write them at 10x. The access time for this drive is fairly fast and it read all types of DVD and CD media I've thrown at it. If DVD writing was added it would of been a good DVD recording machine, it's quite a shame really.

Man the sound that on this machine makes me want to put a revolver to my temple and blast my brains out into wallpaper paste. The stereo speakers that mount either side of the laptop is good and all since that gives us more of a stereo effect. But when sound or music plays through them too loud, you get a choking cat vomiting up fur balls of static blasting out from them. Oh... it's not even loud... it's just above 3/4 volume in Windows XP. If I want to die from screeching I would tell my grandmother she is old, ugly and feed her beans so that she would fart hard enough to dislocate her hip.

This laptop can really do with a RAM upgrade. The 256MB can't really cut the mustard when it comes to modern day computing, the laptop slows down to a grandpa walking stick limp when you have as much as three programs running at the same time (or by running Adobe Photoshop with 2 big pictures loaded). The RAM you need to buy isn't cheap either, it costs around £60 for an extra 256MB making the laptop £610 in total. With that money I might as well go for the Sony VAIO FR415B that has better graphics, better CPU, 512MB RAM and a larger hard drive (reviewed by me as well).

But hey it's not all bad news, the laptop is very very stable. It has good stamina and will keep running even if it crashes, it will pick itself up and be fine, reliable if you run programs that tend to crash on you alot and take down the entire laptop.

The battery life is alright lasting just over 2 hours with intensive work on the laptop (which is actually watching a DVD, that uses up 80% of the CPU's time). With power saving modes on it can last up to a respectable 3 hours.

The CPU can also be upgraded without need of hiring a Toshiba engineer to install it like other laptops. Just make sure it is compatible with the laptop and then replace the old one with the new one. Installing is a sinch if you know how to change CPUs on a normal PC. Too bad you can't do the same for the DVD drive and the graphics.

So what do I think about this laptop? It's not ugly, it can take a bit of damage with no problems, can deal with CDs/DVDs fairly quickly, average battery life and it's reliably stable. However it sucks at games, it lacks extras, it doesn't come with 512MB RAM, it's heavy and large to lug around, plus the sound on it is terrible. If it was cheaper it would of been a great newbie's laptop, but at this price you're better off making your own laptop out of a cornflakes box, Blue Peter styley. Bad value for money. Good luck! 

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