Toshiba Portege R500

By Dan Ackerman, CNET Asia on 06 August 2007 04:12 PM

Tags: toshiba, notebook, portege, laptop, r500, vaio, sony vaio, ultraportable

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What's your problem re resolut ...Craig Ringer -- 06/08/07

What's your problem re resolution?

"...but we think its just right for a laptop this size. Anything higher, and text and icons become hard to see without going through the hassle of zooming in or changing the resolution"

Every operating system lets you TURN UP THE FONT SIZE. Wow, now your text is the same size it would be with a lower res screen - but PROPERLY SHAPED and SMOOTH. Icons really shouldn't be an issue unless you're pretty hard of vision and unwilling to wear appropriate corrective devices.

Actually modern OSes even automatically render 12pt text as 12pt (pt is a measure of physical size, 1/72 in) rather than converting it to pixels on a fixed and incorrect ratio like Windows XP.

Changing the resolution is pratically never the right solution. Just turn up the font size a little by telling Windows to render fonts at their correct physical size with the Large Fonts option. Windows XP lets you tell it that you want it to use the display's REAL resolution, eg 140dpi or whatever, instead of intentionally getting it wrong and assuming 96dpi like it does by default.

So please, stop encouraging the manufacturers to put cheap low resolution screens on their products. 800 high is barely usable these days since many apps unfortunately use fixed pixel-specified layouts that assume higher resolutions. I'd love a 1680x1050 or 1440x1050 display on a 11" or 12" laptop - and panels that dense appear on larger laptops. They just seem depressingly absent from the ultraportable market. Since Vista has improved high-res display handling, and XP is already OK at it if you have a clue or your laptop is sensibly preconfigured, there's no need to cripple high end hardware with low res displays anymore.

This is similar to the bizarre practice of putting VGA connectors on modern laptops. DVI is marginally larger (and HDMI is much smaller!), and much better. Most importantly, DVI->VGA adapters work very well, but VGA->DVI adapters produce suboptimal results. Why force the user into an A->D->A conversion path? It's bewildering that you didn't even mention the external display options.

You can get detailed specs here:
http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/channel/productDetail.jsp?oid=1760806
so you too can marvel at the bewildering design choices made in this otherwise OK laptop.

The other shortcomings, such as a last-generation chipset with crippling RAM limits and slow graphics (you do NOT want Vista on this thing), the lack of a high capacity battery or modular bay with battery support, and other issues make this a pretty poor offering - especially for the price.

The good: - Fast CPU - Battery life - Bright backlight - Gigabit ethernet (the fact that this isn't universal now is amazing) - Bluetooth, 802.11n - PCMCIA

The bad: - 1.5GB max RAM is pathetic - Last-generation chipset with GMA950 graphics - Low res display - Lacks DVI - No extra-capacity battery available - Can't replace optical drive with secondary battery - No ExpressCard -

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And now Mr. Sony, erhm Anonymo ...Anonymous -- 27/08/07

And now Mr. Sony, erhm Anonymous, what would your interest be in defaming the Toshiba to the extent you just did? Wonder, wonder, wonder...

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AC adapter and external batter ...pan -- 04/01/08

AC adapter and external battery for this Toshiba Portege R500 is here
http://www.global-batteries.com.au/advanced_search_result.php?keywords=Toshiba Portege R500

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