Review: Toshiba Satellite A300D AMD laptop: feature-packed but problematic?

Final thoughts

Toshiba's Satellite A300D-15B mid-range laptop ships with an etail price of £620 and is based around AMD's Turion X2 Ultra processor and discrete Mobility Radeon HD 3650 512MB graphics card.

Tipping the scales at almost 3kg, the good-looking laptop has an excellent 15.4in WXGA+ (1,440x900px) screen, decent gaming credentials, above-average multimedia features, and, surprisingly, room-filling sound.

The downsides, however, are more numerous. A mock carbon fibre-like finishes smudges way too easily, the Turion X2 Ultra CPU is found wanting when compared to Centrino (2), the glossy keyboard is hard to write quickly upon, and the battery-life is poor, not helped by the small-capacity battery. Equally as irksome is the first-instance loading/configuring time for Windows Vista, which amounts to some 40 minutes.

The Satellite A300D looks fantastic on paper but the reality is somewhat different. Toshiba needs to address some of the more pressing concerns by bundling in a larger battery and ensuring that users can begin using their brand-spanking new machine within 10 minutes of first switching it on, rather than wait close to an hour.

Bottom line: £620 buys you considerable graphics power that's compromised by a relatively poor CPU and below-average battery life. There's better value to be had elsewhere, we reckon.

The good

Good-looking
Great screen
Above-average sound

The bad

Relatively poor battery life
Poor CPU performance
Easily-smudged finish
40-minute first-load time
Loud optical drive
Glossy, hard-to-type-on keyboard
Relatively heavy for a 15.4in laptop

HEXUS Rating

HEXUS scores products out of a possible 10. A score for an average-rated product, therefore, is 5, and not 9/10, which is common practise for most other review websites.

Toshiba Satellite Pro A300D-15B

HEXUS Where2Buy

The Toshiba Satellite A300-15B can be purchased for £622, including VAT, at Laskys.

HEXUS Right2Reply

At HEXUS.net, we invite the companies whose products we test to comment on our articles. If any Toshiba representatives choose to respond, we'll publish their commentary here verbatim.

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Surely the only compelling thing about Turion is the integrated chipset graphics in mobile 780G, if you're buying a laptop with discrete graphics such as this then might as well have a Centrino machine with superior CPU…

Turion is a budget solution only IMHO.

Kind of agree, kingpotnoodle, and that's why we've taken a look at a Satellite Pro with M780G. Review coming up in a couple of days.

How can a 40min one time setup of Vista be “Equally as irksome” as something like battery life.

Hey when someone gives me a 1kg laptop with a 24hr battery life I won't care how long it takes to set it up from bare metal.

The two things are not connected in any way.

Because you have to go through that 40-minute process if reinstalling the OS from scratch, and that may happen numerous times during the course of the laptop's life.

It's plain annoying because other companies don't make you go through it.

With respect to battery life, yes, it's poor, but you always have the option to leave it on the mains, which most do.

Something can be equally as annoying as something else and not be connected, naturally.

Tarinder
Because you have to go through that 40-minute process if reinstalling the OS from scratch, and that may happen numerous times during the course of the laptop's life.

It's plain annoying because other companies don't make you go through it.

With respect to battery life, yes, it's poor, but you always have the option to leave it on the mains, which most do.

Something can be equally as annoying as something else and not be connected, naturally.

On average I setup at least one Vista laptop a week. Nearly all of them adopt a similar setup to the Toshiba requiring 30-45 minutes for Vista to sort its self out and run through everything - the only difference being that Intel Core 2 Duo's generally get through it a fair bit quicker… It's the same idea as a blank install of Vista - it dumps the image on the hard drive then unpacks it. Same thing with a factory fresh laptop ins 99% of cases.

My personal laptop, Dell XPS M1530, was also exactly the same when it arrived (except the CPU ran through it a bit quicker). Same as the Sony Vaio I bought for my brother.

Maybe its a case that the demo units given to you in the past have already been setup?