Toshiba Satellite P500-1DZ review

More importantly, the display’s backlight is dull and uneven, so while colours are fairly accurate, contrast is weak and everything looks rather washed out. A glossy finish and tight vertical viewing angles mean that you’ll have to adjust the lid’s tilt carefully to get the best picture. It’s adequate for most uses, but we can’t recommend it to those who enjoy watching films or who work a lot with photos or movies.

This is a shame, as otherwise the P500 fulfils its role as a desktop replacement admirably. The Intel Core i7 720QM processor powered it to a score of 100 overall – exactly the same speed as our reference desktop PC with its quad-core AMD Phenom II. The Core i7’s Hyper-Threading means its four cores appear as eight threads under Windows, so you can run multiple applications concurrently.

An Nvidia GeForce GT 330M provides enough graphics horsepower to achieve a playable frame rate in our Call of Duty 4 benchmark. At the screen’s native resolution, you’d have to turn off anti-aliasing to get over 30fps, so while it will run most games, you’ll have to sacrifice some eye-candy to gain smooth game-play. With Nvidia’s CUDA technology, you’ll also gain speed boosts in GPU-accelerated applications such as some video transcoding software.

There’s also a decent set of internal speakers that pump out a fair volume and have a well-rounded sound. In almost every aspect, the P500 brings the advantages of a desktop PC to a laptop; only the dismal display lets it down. The Asus N73Jn has a smaller screen resolution but a fantastic design and sound system, while the Acer Aspire Ethos 8943G has everything, and is better value at the same price.