Oct 28

Toshiba U400 Laptop

Posted in: Today's Chili

The Toshiba U400 is a very sleek and professional looking laptop that barely tips the 2kg scales – so its a sure fire hit in the portability department. It has some really nice touches – but there are some glaring problems as well.

Usability

This keys on the keyboard press down nicely and they feel light to the touch. The keys are raised, but not to much and enable quick typing without your fingers getting caught on any of the other keys. The touch pad is seamless with the rest of the casing and feels smooth to the touch – the only problem with this is that you sometimes don’t notice that your finger has slipped off the side of the touch pad and end up wondering why your mouse isn’t moving. The touch pad is nicely lit up at night by a little LED bar light that glows above the touch pad.

There are the usual controls on the top of the keyboard, back light on/off, launch windows media player, play stop and directional controls which also all glow a crisp white should you choose to use them. All the quick navigation keys are used by gliding your finger over them and no pressing is required. The same goes for the lighting which can be turned off when not needed to preserve battery power.

It comes loaded with a built in web camera which boasts a maximum resolution of 1280×1024 in picture and video mode which comes in handy for keeping in touch with your loved ones who are miles away. The built in microphone is located right next to it so it picks up audio very decently. It also boasts a DVD-RW drive making it a powerful, yet small, notebook. It also has a built in card-reader (SD/MD etc.), which enables easy sharing from your camera.

All the Software


The laptop comes loaded with a host of software apart from Windows Vista Home Premium including Google Desktop Search, Picassa software, McAfee Security Centre, Desktop SMS, Google Earth and many more all of which make it slow to boot up and i can almost guarantee that most of them will be removed within the first couple of days use. In terms of power, this notebook isn’t meant to be a power house and doesn’t boast a very impressive windows vista rating, coming in at an expected 2.4 with the graphics card being the lowest denominator.

Pros

  • Small and light – less than 2Kgs
  • Bright screen – Thanks to TruBrite technology
  • Large 250 Gig HDD

Cons

  • Graphics, could have packed some more punch.
  • Doesnt have Wireless-N

Conclusion

Its a great little notebook that fits neatly into the market place and looks great compared to its competitors. It will do well for those who use laptops while travelling and don’t require all the power that you get from the larger more powerful notebooks.

Pricing and Availability

The Toshiba U400 can be purchased from Jump Shopping and retails for around R7400

Full Specs

  • Dimensions: 314×229×27.5mm
  • Weight: 1900g
  • Operating system: Windows Vista Home Premium
  • Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T5550 1.83GHz
  • RAM: 3GB
  • Storage: 250GB
  • Graphics card: Intel 965
  • Screen size: 13.3in
  • Screen resolution: 1280×800px
  • Optical drive: DVD Multi
  • Wi-Fi: Yes
  • Firewire: Yes
  • DVI: No
  • Bluetooth: Yes
  • HDMI: No
  • USB: 4
  • Digital TV card: No

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