Toshiba Satellite U500
Notebook
Scott Bartley | Tuesday, September 29 2009Toshiba recently rolled out a swathe of new notebooks across its range. They vary in both form and price, ranging from cheap and cheerful to high end, and covering ultra-portables through to desktop replacements. Common to all models, however, is a new suite of software utilities and physical enhancements designed to make our lives richer and our computing time more entertaining and reliable. That’s what the marketing blurb says anyway. We took a look at some of these new tricks on one of the newly-released machines, the Satellite U500, to see if these applications really are worth using, or just something else to uninstall from a new machine. But first, let’s see what the U500 is all about.
The U500 just manages to fall into the ultraportable category by virtue of its small size, yet it’s quite a stocky wee beast. Weighing 2.1kg and standing 40mm tall with the lid shut means the notebook retains a not insignificant bulk. To put it in perspective it sports a 13.3-inch display and measures 315mm long and 230mm deep – still quite compact. What the added bulk does mean, however, is that this notebook is able to pack in some powerful hardware.
An Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 CPU running at 2.53GHz is backed up by 4GB of RAM and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500 video card, making it a serious little performer. This, along with the generous 250GB hard drive, pushed the U500 to a WorldBench 6 score of 99, placing it almost on a par with the winner of our last ultraportable group test, the Sony Vaio Z36, but costing nearly $2,000 less. Indeed, at just $2,699 the Satellite U500 seems quite the bargain given the full set of features and outstanding performance.
Other niceties include a fingerprint scanner, DVD burner, HDMI, webcam, eSATA and three USB ports.
All these goodies do produce one unwanted side effect, average battery life. Our DVD rundown test, which is run with all power saving options turned off, saw the U500 deplete the battery in around 1 hour 45 minutes – not quite enough for a whole movie. Under regular use (web browsing, typing, listening to music) with power saving features turned back on, we managed to squeeze a good three hours out of it.
All of the above, however, can be applied to every notebook vendor – building a notebook with a certain set of features to derive a particular standard of performance is fairly easy, to set your notebook apart from the masses requires exceptional build quality and a software suite people actually find useful. Toshiba’s effort is mostly pretty good. Little physical touches like being able to charge your MP3 player (or any other USB-charged device) when the notebook is turned off via a USB port, handy media playback controls above the backlit keyboard and a fingerprint scanner to take the hassle out of remembering passwords are all ticks in the plus column for the U500. Stuff like this is actually useful as opposed to gimmicky.
Some of the utilities included do a good job when it comes to protecting the health of your notebook – 3D hard drive shock protection, for instance, is able to detect a potentially damaging knock and will instantly park the read heads on the hard drive to avoid data loss. This is something you may never fully appreciate because, if it does its job properly, you’ll never realise the pain you’ve avoided.
Toshiba’s Eco Utility is an advanced power saving application designed to more efficiently manage power consumption by dynamically adjusting things like screen brightness, backlighting and hard drive operation. It definitely increases battery life, whether it increases it more than Windows’ built in power management is too close to call.
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