Toshiba Satellite 5200
Toshiba has only just recently launched this product. We were lucky enough to be one of the first to get to play around with it. We can assure you we were sad to see it go back.
This Intel Pentium 4 2.2GHz-based notebook houses the first DVD-RAM/DVD-RW/DVD-R/CD-RW/CD-R drive. So not only will users now be able to burn back up copies of their movies, users can also benefit from the high-capacity/low cost DVD-RAM storage format.
It also features 512MB of RAM, a 60GB HDD, 15in display (native 1600 x 1200) and nVidia’s new GeForce 4 460 graphics processor together with 64MB of video memory.
This notebook is very large and heavy and you may find it a bit of a beast to cart around. However, with all the size available to this notebook, Toshiba has made sure it’s well equipped. Apart from the modem and LAN jacks (which pretty much come standard with every notebook these days) the Toshiba also offers Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It also offers heaps of common connectors as well as an S/PDIF jack, which will enable you to connect up to digital speakers.
It doesn’t end there. There’s an SD slot as well as a single Type II PC Card slot and a Style bay that can house a second battery. You will also find a great pair of Harmon Kardon speakers and a subwoofer.
Now for the really cool features (if the above aren’t already enough): there’s a set of control buttons on the front of the notebook that will let you play CDs without having to turn the notebook on. With these buttons you can also control your DVD player. Furthermore there’s an LCD display that will display the mode you are in as well as other things like the time and date and the battery charge level. What we loved was the fact that we were able to operate all this from a remote control. You can even power the notebook on and off from the wireless remote control.
This is also a very fast notebook. It offered not only the best graphics performance but the longest battery life as well. It was a tiny bit slower than the IBM and Acer in Business Winstone this was because it had to run this test at a higher resolution, which would have ultimately affected its score. You can run this notebook at a lower resolution but we suggest you use stick to its native resolution as it offers the best image quality.
We unfortunately couldn’t run Multimedia Content Creation Winstone on this Toshiba. This was mainly a software issue with the benchmark.
| Product: | Toshiba Satellite 5200 |
| Price: | AU$6,050 |
| Vendor: | Toshiba |
| Phone: | 13 30 70 |
| Web: | www.toshiba.com.au |
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| Interoperability: |
½No legacy ports, but do you really need them? |
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| Futureproofing: |
½
A wealth of advanced features. |
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| ROI: |
½Very fast, spiffy, and not too expensive considering the features. |
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| Service: |
1-year warranty on parts and labour. |
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| Rating: |
½ |
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2%
4%
