Notebook Hunter

The Toshiba Satellite A500/031 entertainment notebook is a bargain at $1388, as in addition to having solid overall specs it has a Blu-Ray reader and a TV tuner. It has an Intel Core i5-520M, which is one of the faster Intel Core i5 processors and therefore one of the faster processors available overall. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics processor is roughly equivalent, being fast while not the fastest of its kind. Games like Modern Warfare 2 on low to medium settings won’t tax the hardware, and watching Blu-Ray movies also won’t be a problem.

Those solid overall specs mentioned earlier include a big 640GB hard drive, decent 4GB of RAM, and large if slightly low resolution (1366x768) 16in screen. It’s more than good enough to take full advantage of the Blu-Ray reader, and with the TV tuner you’ve got a complete entertainment package. While it would be nice to have a higher resolution screen, in all honesty it would push the price up

The portability suffers thanks to all of the features, as 2.94kg will make lugging this around a bit of an effort. It’s also 42.9mm thick, 259mm deep, and 384mm wide, making this a chunky notebook. At this price you’re getting a real bargain with this notebook. Get it while you can!

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