Toshiba Satellite Pro S500-10E review

Toshiba’s Satellite Pro S500 is a business-oriented Core i3 laptop with Windows 7 Professional 32-bit, a smart looking chassis and a fingerprint scanner. Although it has a glossy 15.6in screen, it isn’t too reflective and has decent viewing angles. Its image is slightly cold-looking, but colours are still accurate.

The main keyboard is traditionally laid out with chunky keys and plenty of space separating it from the cursor keys and numeric keypad. The Enter key is much skinnier than usual, but this didn’t adversely affect our typing style.

The S500 has a 2.13GHz Intel Core i3-330M processor, 2GB RAM and a 250GB hard disk. It uses the Core i3’s built-in graphics processor, which isn’t really powerful enough for gaming. It managed 10.6fps in our Call of Duty 4 test, but this won’t bother many business users. The S500 performed well in our application benchmarks, producing an overall score of 76.

In terms of connectivity, the S500 has four USB ports, one of which doubles as an eSATA port. This is handy if you need to connect a lot of peripherals. An ExpressCard/54 slot can be used to add components like a USB3 port or 5GHz wireless adaptor. It also has the usual memory card reader and DVD-RW drive. As well as a VGA port, there’s also a mini-DisplayPort rather than the more common HDMI output. Few monitors have DisplayPort inputs but you can buy mini-DisplayPort to HDMI converter for around £10.

The S500 is genuinely comfortable to use, from the keyboard layout to the clear 1,366×768 display. A minor niggle is that the fingerprint scanner is positioned between the two buttons below the touchpad, which made us want to treat it as a scroll wheel or third button. Scrolling is in fact achieved by running your finger up and down the right-hand side of the touchpad. We were pleased to find that, although it’s almost flush with the wrist rest, we never accidentally hit the touchpad while typing. Sound from the built-in speakers is loud, which is great if you’re giving a presentation with audio content, but very tinny and almost completely lacking in bass.

The Satellite Pro S500 is beautifully made, with an excellent display and keyboard. However, you can get more powerful Core i5 laptops for a similar price. Unless you need a fingerprint scanner, eSATA port and DisplayPort, Acer’s marginally more expensive Aspire 5741 is a better buy for home users.