Toshiba Satellite 30CDT
The Toshiba Satellite 30CDT was the only Celeron-based notebook we received. It was equipped with a Celeron 500, 128MB of RAM, 10GB Fujitsu hard disk drive, and a 12.1in display. The Satellite weighed in at 2.013kg. This notebook was a little thicker than most of the other notebooks. It had a built-in CD-ROM drive. This notebook did not come with a DVD-ROM drive. Like most of the other notebooks, the Toshiba had an external floppy disk drive. But the interesting thing about this floppy drive is that it plugged into the notebook's parallel port.
We must say that this particular notebook did not come with many frills. It's very conservative and basic. Most of the Toshiba notebooks we have tested in the past had track pointers. This particular model, however, had a glide pad. What we also found different was that all the I/O connectors were located on the left-hand side of the notebook (connectors you would normally find on the back of a notebook). The battery pack in this case fills up most of that area.
The keypad on this Toshiba had different colours for both the standard keys and the function keys. The feel of the keys, however, was a bit on the light side and there was a reasonable amount of bounce in the keyboard. The 12.1in display, while offering a good sharp picture, was not supported too well. When we applied pressure to the back of the panel we saw some horrific rippling. It also took a few seconds for the smudging and rippling to disappear from the display. At the bottom of the display were two very small speakers. The sound though was quite good. The sound they produced was louder than most of the other speakers and it was very clear.
When we turned this notebook over we didn't see any easy way to access the system RAM or even be able to swap the hard drive. We then tried to remove the keypad but we couldn't even do that. So we didn't really know where the hard drive was hiding nor where the RAM was. To get at them, we had to literally pull the notebook apart from the base.
The Toshiba did not break any speed records. It did, however, manage to get some good scores in Content Creation Winstone and Business Winstone. But where it really stood out was Battery Mark. A time of two hours and 20 minutes was enough to put this notebook in second place.
With only a Celeron 500MHz CPU, this notebook had less power than most of the other ultralights in this test. With this in mind, the Toshiba didn't perform badly after all (in fact it wasn't the slowest notebook). It was faster than the Acer notebook as well as the Gateway Solo 3350. What made the difference was its performance in Business Disk and High-End Disk, which was excellent. The overall performance of the notebook was excellent but we felt there were still many areas that could be improved.
Toshiba Satellite 30CDT
Company:Toshiba Corporation
Ph:1800 680 662
Price:AU$4,015
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