Notebook Hunter

To the best of our knowledge this notebook is no longer available at major or minor retailers, and we therefore consider it to be End Of Life or EOL. This is why it's rated 4/10, to distinguish it from currently available notebooks. If you've got information to show that this notebook is not EOL, please let us know and we'll update this entry accordingly.

For $2,599 the Toshiba Satellite P500/11T is part of an older series of Toshiba entertainment notebooks which standout due to having gigantic screens. However, the overall specs are such that it's a better idea to either grab a bargain on an older alternative like the Acer 8943G or to just go with a new entertainment notebook that has a slightly smaller screen but otherwise vastly better specs.

A TV tuner makes it possible to either watch TV on the enormous 18.4in (1,680x1,050 resolution) screen or to record it to the equally massive 1,000GB hard disk drive. The Blu-ray burner is consequently well catered to as well, because even though the screen isn't full HD it's still reasonably close.

Powering the P500 is a first generation Intel Core i7-740QM (1.74GHz) processor and 4GB of RAM that is more than enough to simultaneously and smoothly run multiple intensive programs at once. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics card is fairly long in the tooth, but it can still run newer games like StarCraft 2 at medium settings. Portability isn't the P500's strong suit, because it weighs 4.4kg and measures 442.6mm wide, 294.2mm deep and 42.8mm thick.