Toshiba Satellite T130

Battery life? Not at all bad. Reg Hardware's test stresses the battery by running PCMark Vantage continually, keeping CPU, GPU and hard drive thoroughly active. The Wi-Fi radio is always on and associated with an access point, and the screen is set to maximum brightness. Windows' power conservation settings are disabled.

The inevitable choice of colours

Under such conditions, the T130 ran for four hours, putting it just behind two 11.6in CULV notebooks - and one of those has a feeble single-core processor. In the real world, you'll get around eight hours' use out of the T130's battery - a good number in anyone's book.

I wouldn't consider a single-core T130, either in its Pro or vanilla forms. That leaves the T130-11J, T130-16W and T130-170 from the consumer range and the Satellite Pro T130-15F. The latter costs around £700 for just 1GB more Ram than the £599 T130-170 has, and most users will be as well off with Windows 7 Home Premium as Windows 7 Professional.

But given there's not much difference between the performance of the 1.3GHz Pentium SU4100 and that of the Core 2 Duo SU7300, I'd suggest the Pentium-based T130-16W (£530) or T103-11J (£450) are definitely the best-value options. The 16W is black, the 11J red, and their Ram and HDD specs are, respectively, 3GB and 4GB, and 320GB and 250GB.

Verdict

If not having an optical drive is a killer, you can forget this machine, but if you're after a long-running laptop that delivers a decent mainstream computing performance but doesn't restrict you to a netbook-size screen, it's well worth a look. ®