Toshiba M45 Notebook
Toshiba Satellite M45 Review
Toshiba M45 Laptop
The Toshiba Satellite M45 was recently released by Toshiba. Toshiba M45 notebook features a 15.4″ XGA widescreen TruBrite display. But most significantly, it houses the newest Centrino platform from Intel, Sonoma, meaning the 1.60GHz Pentium M chip provided with the M45-S331 has a 533MHz Front Side Bus ( FSB ), 2MB L2 Cache and the Intel 915GM chipset for better processor and graphics performance.
Design
The Toshiba Satellite M45 is a 15.4″ screen notebook that weighs in at 6.2lbs and is most accurately described as a desktop replacement style notebook, but one that will not break your back if you need to move it between home and office on a daily basis.
The Toshiba M45 notebook casing is created of a firm and sturdy plastic material that makes provision for lighter weight, but the casing is not so sturdy that I’d would like to see this laptop dropped any distance. It’s not as solidly built as say an IBM ThinkPad or Panasonic ToughBook, but the general build feels more convincing to me than most Dell Inspiron notebooks I have used. So the construction and sturdiness of the M45 is most accurately described as middle of the road.
The Toshiba M45 notebook comes with a generous number of ports. On the left side is 1-USB 2.0 port, a VGA out port and a PCMCIA Type-II Computer Card slot. Also on the left side is a slot location for an Express Card that was reputedly thought better of and scrapped. I’m baffled by this, you can obviously see that above the PCMCIA slot there is a slot and it has the “EX” designation for Express Card and on the Fast Start Guide indicates the machine having an Express Card slot. However, in the manual there is no mention of this card slot ( it does mention the PCMCIA card slot) and there is absolutely no way to get rid of the dummy piece of plastic Toshiba has put into this “we were going to put it in, but decided not to” port.
Battery
With a rudimentary battery drain test of going from full charge to forced shut-down and hibernation at five pc battery charge remaining, the Toshiba M45 notebook achieved one hour and 17 minutes of battery life on the standard battery under the following conditions:
1) Wi-Fi on
2 ) Screen Lightness full and forced on
3 ) Machine idling with no programs being used
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