Toshiba Tecra M10-11V review

The Tecra M10-11V is the only business laptop here.

It has a thick, square case with a plain metallic finish. It’s not the lightest laptop here, but at 2.4kg it won’t be too much of a chore to carry. Its light-usage battery life of almost four hours is good enough for a fair amount of work away from a power socket.

The laptop comes with Windows Vista Business installed, which affects the benchmark results slightly as this operating system lacks the MPEG2 codec required by one of our tests. The result is an Overall PCMark Vantage score that’s almost 25 per cent slower than that of Dell’s Studio XPS 13, which has the same 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 processor. The discrepancy is also due to the Tecra’s 2GB of RAM, which is disappointing at this price. It’s also a shame that it comes with a 160GB hard disk, while most of the laptops here have at least 250GB drives.

The onboard Intel GMA4500HD graphics managed only 5.2fps in Call of Duty 4, so 3D gaming isn’t an option with this laptop.

The 14.4in widescreen display has a high resolution of 1,440×900, which provides plenty of desktop space. Its matt finish makes the screen easy to see in all but the brightest conditions, but colours look slightly dull.

The full-sized keyboard and standard layout make touch typing easy, and we liked the addition of a touchstick as well as a touchpad. Sadly, the touchpad is small and tricky to use, and its buttons sit flush with the case, making them hard to locate by touch.

The M10-11V has an eSATA port, four USB ports and support for FireWire, Draft-N wireless and Bluetooth, so it’s reasonably well prepared for modern peripherals. There’s even a built-in 3G modem, although you’ll need to provide your own SIM. It has a PC Card slot rather than a newer ExpressCard slot.

It’s well built and comfortable to use, but the Tecra M10-11V’s small hard disk and 2GB of RAM mean that Dell’s Studio XPS 13 is much better value.