Toshiba Portege A600 Laptop – A Review
3 min readSpecs:
Notebook: Toshiba Portege A600-122
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo SU9300
Graphics Adapter: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 4500MHD
Display: 12.1 inch, 16:10, 1280 x 800 pixels and glossy.
Weight: 1.5kg (lighter than most notebooks)
Prices: start from $1,399 upwards
Description:
The Toshiba Portege A600 is a good-looking, slick and lightweight laptop with built-in modem HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) – which is simply the new protocol for Mobile Data Transmission (MDA). HSDPA is a vast improvement on W- CDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access – 3G protocol). HSDPA can achieve data transmission speeds of 8-10 megabytes per second, which means faster video and music streaming, amongst other positive features.
This notebook has a 12.1 inch display and is able to run several programs concurrently with alacrity.
Several features make it stand out from its predecessors:
o Eco-friendly: The Portege A600 is ENERGY STAR 4.0 rated having attained Gold status through Green Electronics Council’s Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT). For the uninformed, ENERGY STAR is a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy which is supportive of energy-efficient products that are cost-friendly and help to protect the environment.
o LED Display: The 12.1 inch display has a LED (Light Emitting Diode) which provides back-lit vibrant color images with a sharp, superior quality. Most backlighting LED displays sacrifice quality at the expense of thicker, heavier and less easily-portable laptops. The Portege A600 surprises, however, with all the features of backlighting but is slim, lightweight and has excellent battery life/power consumption.
o Integrated Optical Drive: High Density Mounting Technology (HDMT) gives this Toshiba notebook duo-sided motherboard component mounting technology. This mass-reducing technology is what has enabled the Portégé A600 to have a nice and slender form and is lightweight and good-looking. (Neither is there any need for supplementary cables).
o Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 4500MHD: The shared-memory GPU and GM45 chipset (Montevina) is speed-enabled due to the addition of two shaders and a high core clock. This notebook is not really supportive of games apart from DirectX 10 games which are playable on very low settings. The video processor can assist-decode HD videos and provide effortless Blu-Ray playback with slow CPU’s.
o Intel Core 2 Duo: (is paired with Core Solo) which attains 5-20% more speed without the need for excess power consumption. As an extra feature, it has a fourth decoder, amplified SSE unit and supplementary ALU (Arithmetical Logical Unit).
o Sleep-and-Charge USB/eSATA Combo Port: The port of the Portégé A600 combines two functions:
1. Capacity to charge USB external devices regardless of whether Portégé A600 is off/on, in sleep/hibernation modes.
2. Data transfer from eSATA external hard drives: five times faster than the USB 2.0.
o Toshiba’s EasyGuard Technology with PC Health Monitor: Alerts the user when the system is in need of attention. This feature keeps track of the hard drive, battery life, temperature, etc., and forms a vital part of the Portégé A600, ensuring HDD protection. The keyboard is spill-resistant.
