One for the road: Seven road warrior notebooks tested

Toshiba Portege 4010

Toshiba Portege 4010 The Toshiba Portege 4010 is an ultra light portable notebook, and as such we can't directly compare this notebook to the other notebooks since it belongs in a different class. If you don't mind using a small screen and performance isn't as much of an issue as weight, you should have a look at this notebook.

The Toshiba only weighs 1.9kg. Of course, in order to keep a notebook under 2kg you have to make the display small. The Toshiba only has a 12.1in TFT, which would be a little impractical to do a presentation from. The Toshiba is equipped with a Pentium III 933MHz processor with 256MB of RAM and a 30GB IBM HDD.

Road Warrior Notebooks
Acer TravelMate 630/AOpen 1545
Apple iBook G3 600
Dell Latitude C640
IBM ThinkPad T30
Sony PCG-FXA10
Toshiba Portege 4010
Specifications
Benchmark Results
How we tested
What to look for
Cost effective laptop deployment
Sample scenario
Editor's Choice
About RMIT Test Labs

The Toshiba was the slowest in every single test, though it could not by any means be described as “sluggish”. In terms of running the latest operating systems and office applications, it's actually quite fast.

The Toshiba isn't short of features or connectors despite its size and weight. It features a Slim SelectBay that houses a DVD-ROM drive. This drive can be interchanged with a second hard disk drive, second battery, or a combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive.

The Toshiba also features a modem, 10/100 Ethernet, Wi-Fi and two PC Card slots as well as a Secure Digital media slot and a host of other standard ports.

One area where this notebook really wins out is in battery performance. We were able to run this notebook for over three and a half hours. As well as the smaller screen, the Pentium III processor appears to be less power-hungry than the Pentium 4.

Product: Toshiba Portege 4010

Price: AU$4730

Vendor: Toshiba

Phone: 133 070

Web: www.isd.toshiba.com.au

Interoperability:
No support for legacy equipment, but has built-in Wi-Fi.

Futureproofing: ½
Small screen, not the fastest.

ROI:
Expensive but feature packed, excellent battery life.

Service:
3-year warranty.

Rating:

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