As a budget laptop, the Toshiba Satellite M35X-S163 tries to give you the most bang for your buck. The bang ends up sounding more like a whimper; the processor and the 4,200-rpm 60GB hard drive aren’t particularly fast. This notebook meets its goal of offering decent productivity performance, a good-looking widescreen display, and all of the ports you’ll need for less than a grand. Its oversized body and inexplicably short battery life won’t cut it for users looking for practical portability.
Without question, the best feature of the Toshiba Satellite M35X-S163 is the cost. Every component from the processor to the hard drive has been scaled down a notch to shave a little something extra off the sticker price. Despite the scrimping, the M35X covers all of the basic functions: a bright 15.4-inch display, integrated 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, a DVD/CD-RW drive, three USB 2.0 ports, and FireWire-everything you need to cover most everyday functions.
Officially, the Satellite series is marketed for mobile multimedia, and it’s almost as if the M35X was once a more powerful rig that’s been hollowed out in order to knock down the price. It’s big, weighing nearly seven pounds and measuring 14.4 inches across, and the beefy body makes it slightly larger than what you would cart on airplanes or back and forth between meetings. The black-and-silver color scheme imparts a professional, futuristic appearance complemented by its curvy corners. The notebook quietly establishes a presence that says it’s serious.
The 15.4-inch WXGA display looks sharp. The maximum 1280 x 800-resolution is low by today’s standards, but it’s more than enough pixels for most applications. DVDs run smoothly, with little or no choppiness, and two well-placed speakers help fill the room with sound. For pure multimedia purposes, like listening to music or watching movies, the M35X performs admirably, but you’ll be lucky to get through the credits if the system is unplugged.
The function keys on the keyboard have been rearranged and the Windows button has been eliminated altogether. Probably a space-saving measure, but the disappearance will disorient keyboard shortcut lovers who rely on the Windows key to switch back and forth to the desktop and between applications.
A 1.4-GHz Celeron M powers this configuration of the Satellite M35X, which is in the featherweight division of Intel’s processors. (The M35X-S1631 uses an even slower 1.3-GHz Celeron M, but it costs $80 more because it uses Windows XP Professional instead of Home Edition.) Its MobileMark score of 179 is about what you would expect from a value-priced portable, and we had no problem with basic productivity tasks, including word processing, e-mail, and Web surfing.
Where the M35X stumbled was in the endurance department. It ran out of juice after 1 hour and 43 minutes. With that kind of battery life, you’re essentially sentencing your notebook to only occasional mobility within the home or office, or maybe one class before you have to head back to the dorm.
One especially bright spot is that the Wi-Fi isn’t your ordinary 802.11b/g; it’s Atheros SuperG enhanced Wi-Fi. In our tests, the Toshiba M35X rated 42.2 Mbps, an astonishingly high score. You won’t notice much of a difference when surfing the Web, but you will get better performance if you’re into streaming music or video files.
Toshiba throws in a copy of Microsoft Works, as well as a three-month subscription to Norton AntiVirus 2004 and Intuit Quicken New User Edition 2004. For multimedia there’s Sonic Solutions RecordNow Basic, and ArcSoft Showbiz for playing DVDs, but not much else.
The M35X is a reasonable choice for $999, but we would recommend a $100 upgrade for the S311 configuration of this notebook. You’ll get all of the same widescreen goodness, plus a faster and more efficient 1.5-GHz Pentium M processor and a 5-in-1 memory card reader.
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|
| Processor |
| Processor Type |
Intel Mobile Celeron Processor |
| Data Bus Speed |
400 MHz |
Cache Memory |
| Installed Size |
1 MB |
RAM |
| Installed Size |
512 MB |
| Technology |
DDR-SDRAM (DDRRAM) |
Storage |
| Drive Controllers |
IDE (ATA/EIDE/ATAPI) |
Optical Storage |
| Type |
DVD/CD-RW Combo,
Hard Drive |
Display |
| Type |
Active Matrix LCD (TFT) |
| Aspect Ratio |
16:10 |
| Graphics Processor / Vendor |
Intel Extreme Graphics |
| Max. Resolution |
1280 x 800 |
| Video Bus |
AGP (Version Unspecified) |
Audio |
| Sound Support |
Realtek ALC250 Software Sound, Direct 3D Sound |
Networking |
| Data Link Protocol |
Ethernet (10/100 Mbps),
Wireless Ethernet - 11 Mbps IEEE802.11b,
Wireless Ethernet - 54 Mbps IEEE802.11g |
Expansion |
| Expansion |
Type II PC Card |
Miscellaneous |
| Chipset Type |
Intel 855GME |
| Included Devices |
Keyboard,
Touchpad |
Operating System |
| Operating System |
Microsoft Windows XP |
Dimensions (W x D x H) |
| Unit |
1.48 in x 14.4 in x |
Weight |
| Unit |
6.8 lbs |
|
|
= Comment
= Outstanding
= Good
= Poor
= Bad
