The Excellent Toshiba Laptop Models
Like most journalists and other mobile professionals, many people love the lightest, thinnest Toshiba laptops. These machines aren't full-fledged desktop replacements. But they save your back if you have to tote them everywhere, and they make it possible to do real work on coach seats in airplanes.
In recent years, the keyboards and screens on these little machines have gotten much better, and they now pack plenty of speed, memory and hard-disk capacity into the three pounds or so they typically weigh. So the biggest compromise that remains is in the area of battery life. Even the IBM ThinkPad 240, is one of the best in this class, has a miserable battery life of only about an hour and a half, using the standard battery.
Lately, people have been testing a new entry from Toshiba that uses a clever design to make huge strides in battery life for laptops. The Portege 3440CT costs $2,500, weighs just 3.4 pounds, and is only .75 inches thick. It comes with a 500 MHz Pentium III processor, 64 megabytes of memory and a six-gigabyte hard disk. Its vivid screen is 11.3 inches and has an excellent resolution of 1024 by 768. The keyboard has a nice feel. Like most machines in its weight class, the Portege lacks internal CD-ROM and floppy drives, though an external floppy is standard. In tests, it actually beat the claimed 2.5 hours, getting a little over three hours of life. That's just using the standard battery. Toshiba also has figured out a way to stretch that battery life to incredible eight or nine hours.
This feat is accomplished with a slick optional accessory called the high-capacity battery slice. The "slice" is a special, thin base that snaps onto the bottom of the little Portege. It contains a long-life battery that roughly triples the machine's overall battery life. You just pop the machine onto the battery base, and press a button on the side to engage the extra power. The high-capacity battery slice costs $459, and it adds 2.2 pounds in extra weight and .6 inches in height. But that still makes for a fairly light and thin machine. With the ThinkPad 240, you'd have to buy and carry several costly extra batteries, not one compact attachment. The laptop can run continuously for long hours, playing digital music. This is a power-intensive activity, because it uses the hard drive a lot. You don't have to take any special power-saving precautions, relying only on the default settings in Toshiba's excellent power-management software. You also didn't have to allow the machine to remain in standby mode. When the internal battery flagged, just snap on the battery slice and press the button. Toshiba has created another good power-saving touch. This machine performs hibernation faster and better than any laptop. Hibernation is a process whereby the machine saves an image of its running programs and files on the hard disk, then shuts down to preserve the battery. When you want to work again, all your stuff is restored to life, just where you left off. This is a slow procedure on most machines, but on the new Portege, it's very quick and reliable.
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