Not just a pretty face
Jenneth Orantia29 February 2008, 5:41 PM
The Toshiba Satellite A200 offers two attributes that are sorely missing in the sub-$1,000 notebook segment: style and decent performance.
It’s not exactly eye-catching, but the A200’s curvy black casing and champagne-coloured keyboard area is quietly attractive — especially when compared to the other notebooks in this price range.
It’s also the only laptop under a grand to offer a non-Celeron processor; in this case, the 1.73GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core T2080. Performance was noticeably zippier in general use — an observation backed up by the PCMark05 score of 2,393 — but we’d still recommend upping the default 512MB memory to at least 1GB to run Windows Vista Home Basic at a decent clip. Like the Acer, Compaq and Lenovo notebooks, the A200 wasn’t able to run 3DMark06.
A vibrant 15.4in display coupled with excellent front-firing speakers make the Satellite A200 ideal for multimedia, and the two hours and 15 minutes of battery life should comfortably see you through most feature-length flicks while on the go.
The 80GB hard drive is a tad limited for storing a music and video collection in, but this is easily forgiven when you compare the rest of the A200’s specs to other similarly priced laptops.