But that doesn't tell the whole story. In use, the T110 didn't feel that much faster than the top-of-the-line netbooks we've used. Partly that's the slow hard drive Toshiba has equipped the T110 with - copying data and installing apps felt more slow than carrying out the same tasks on other notebooks does and not really any different from doing so on netbook.
Excellent battery life
Drive and CPU conspire to make the T110 seem generally less responsive than we would have expected - and certainly less so than the Acer 1810TZ.
In fairness, it has to said that the T110 ran for fractionally longer than the 1810TZ did in our battery test. We run PCMark Vantage in a loop until the laptop goes to sleep. We have the screen on maximum brightness, Wi-Fi and connected to a basestation. Comparisons aside, the T110 put in a very good test performance that translates to around eight hours' usage in the real world, and you can't fault that.
Or the software bundle. Toshiba goes to town here, equipping the T110 with a host of utilities for adjusting system settings, keeping your drivers up to date, tweaking the Bios without entering it and even monitoring your laptop's power consumption. TimeLine lists the documents and apps you've used and when you did so, while Board provides a pin-board style UI to access settings and display notes, webpage bookmarks, reminders, widgets and the like.
But here's the thing: Toshiba is currently pricing the T110-11V at £429. That's not in inherently bad price, but when you can buy the smaller, lighter but no less useable Acer 1810TZ with a faster, dual-core CPU for only £21 more, the T110 suddenly doesn't seem such a good deal. You can have the T110-107 for £450. It has a Pentium processor, but again, it has only got one core.
Verdict
Just so no punter mistakes the T110 for a netbook, Toshiba has bulked up this notebook more than it needed to. Still, it's an attractive looking laptop with a wealth of features. If only it was priced more keenly, particularly since it only has a single-core CPU. ®
More Mini-Laptop Reviews...
Acer Aspire 1810TZ Recommended |
Samsung N510 |
Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 |
Sony Vaio X |
Toshiba Satellite T110
COMMENTS
Silly Person
It's not the CPU that's hobbling the system, it's the software. Try running an efficient O/S with efficient software and you can get the system screaming.
habeeb it
I've had my HP TC4200 down to about that level idling after some futzing of the deep-end CPU and power management settings. Granted, that was with the hard disk stopped and the screen turned off, but only using a relatively standard Mobile Pentium 740 CPU and early-gen Centrino chipset. 5+ hours of light browsing in a darkened room (dim backlight setting) off a 40-something battery when it was fresh. Doesn't last quite so well now of course.
Translate that to something with an LED instead of fluoro / CC backlight, Atom processor (or low-end Cele... (*spit*) ...ron like this) and various improvements in the fields of chipset and disk, and I can't see why it's even unusual these days (bit sad that's so, really?). I'd hope to get something with 6 hours out of my same compact 40-blah battery, medium to full screen brightness and still with better all round performance and response, for less money. I'm skeptical that a 1.3ghz single-core Celeron of any flavour can outcompete even my ageing chip (itself SC but probably with better cache/memory access/instruction set/overall architecture), but I'd be happy to give them a fair like-for-like benchmarking just in case.
Key-O-Bard: that certainly is a USP...
...a singer with DRM perhaps?? Now...warez my coat...
Apologies *blush*
Get a Dell Inspiron 13z
Dual core 1.3Ghz, 4GB DDR3, 320GB 7200rpm HDD, Win7 64bit, Geforce 105M GPU, DVD drive, 8cell 8hours+ battery, decent keyobard and trackpad.
Works a treat.
Not so much "had me at hello", but..
..more lost me at "Intel's GMA 4500MHD".
