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

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.