Notebook Hunter

The 14in Toshiba Satellite L840/02P for $992 is a good value ultraportable with some pretty surprising power in its 2.1kg frame. A 2nd Gen Intel Core i5 is the only normal thing here, because it’s joined by a huge 8GB of RAM and a speedy AMD Radeon HD 7670M dedicated graphics card. It’s essentially a powerful all-rounder squeezed into a portable frame.

Processor
The L840 features a 2nd Gen Intel Core i5-2450M (2.5GHz), a mid-range processor that can handle productivity applications and most intensive software. It can burst up to 3.1GHz using Turbo Boost 2.0 Technology if a particularly demanding program is running.

Graphics
It comes with a dedicated graphics card called the AMD Radeon HD 7670M. It’s a powerful mid-range card that should have no issue running most modern games at medium to high settings.

RAM
8GB of RAM is enough to either run many programs at once fluidly or run very intensive image and video editing software.

Storage
A 640GB hard disk drive is large enough for important files along with plenty of programs and documents.

Screen
The L840 sports a 14in (1,366 x 768 resolution) gloss screen. The gloss screen should have better colour richness when compared to a matte screen, but the reflectiveness will make it a bit difficult to use in direct sunlight.

Portability
The L840 has good portability, because it weighs 2.1kg and is 32.5mm thick. It’ll be very easy to carry around.