Hardware Geeks

Last year we reviewed the Portege R500 and we loved it, we even awarded it our 5 Star Editors Choice Award and said it was the best notebook for mobile professionals.

This past July Toshiba announced some revisions to the R500, which upgraded the CPU, Graphics, Memory, and hard drive, and for the past 3 weeks we have been playing with it nonstop and I have to say I haven’t been disappointed in a bit.

Back when we first reviewed the R500 we called “The Donald Trump” of notebooks and it still is, as it is still one of the most elegant machines available today, and with its ultra thin frame and light weight it is definitely one of the lightest.

But elegance and portability means nothing if it doesn’t have the power to do the day to day tasks you’d want from your notebook, so we put the R500-S5007v through some tests.

First we installed Microsoft Office, and I don’t know maybe it was the SSD drive or the Intel Core 2 Duo processor but boy did it quickly install.  No, it didn’t install as fast as Norton Internet Security 2009, but it did install in under 10 minutes which is impressive for Microsoft Office 2007.

After installation, I fired up Word and I started writing this review. Word opened up w/ lightning speed, with hardly any load time, and as I typed the title and continued to type this, it amazed me how comfortable it is typing on this machine. I tend to get cramps when typing on small notebooks but after typing nearly 2 hours and fiddling around with the system my hands don’t bother me one bit, so it definitely is a comfortable system to work on.

When I was done playing with Microsoft Word, I installed WOW, and it handled ok, not great but ok, if you’re stuck in an airport and want to play a quick game it can handle it without any major problems.

I then had my sister test out the system for a few days, she works a lot with Excel and some of her Excel files have dozens of tabs and I have seen her desktop at work stall while Excel updates them.  The R500 handled it like a pro though; she was even able to play a game of solitaire while all the tabs updated. (A bit of an exaggeration but you get the idea)

The R500-S5007v is the world’s thinnest notebook with a built in optical drive (DVD-RW).  The widescreen 12.1 inch display is great for watching DVDs during a cross country flight. Because those of us who fly Delta know that 9 out of 10 times the on board entertainment system doesn’t work.

I was pretty impressed on how the system handled video playback.  I could barely hear the drive spinning which is extremely impressive.

The optical drive is not the only thing the R500-S5007V has to offer, It also has a SD memory card reader, 3 USB ports (which is pretty amazing considering the size of the R500), modem, ethernet jack, Wireless N, Bluetooth + EDR, and lets not forget the built in finger print reader for added security.

To this day, I still have one complaint about the finger print reader – if you have chubby fingers like me, it has problems reading your finger so I personally have to press harder than usual.

Something I really liked about the R500 was that it didn’t get hot.  It’s warmth wasn’t enough to be considered bothersome.

I am pretty sure you all are wondering about battery life. Well, I was able to get the battery to last about 4 hours, when using it like I normally would on my personal PC.  When I played a movie the battery life dropped down to a little under 2 hours.  Those times are all using the battery that ships with the R500.
Another thing to note about the R500 is how durable it is, when you first see it you think it’s made of plastic but it isn’t. It’s made of magnesium, and has shock absorbers of sorts to protect the system in case you drop it.

The R500-S5007V is definitely a system any mobile professional would want, and man or women on the go and for the second time in two years we award it our 5 Star Editors Choice award, and still we think it is the best notebook for mobile professionals.

The R500-S5007v has a starting price of $2999.99 and is available atToshibaDirect.com.

Post Tags: review  toshiba  best of the best  notebook  editors choice  r500 

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