HardwareGeeks.com - Review: Satellite Pro L300D

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Posted by: Michael on Thu, Jul 31st, 2008

Toshiba is known for fantastic notebooks that are well built and last a long time. In fact, those who have had a Toshiba notebook always love it, regardless if it’s a top of the line model or not. In my opinion that’s because Toshiba notebooks are quality built regardless if it’s a budget machine or not, you can’t say that for every OEM.

The Satellite Pro L300D is one of the sweetest basic no frills notebooks around, it gets the job done and it’s powerful.

I used mine while traveling to Berlin and all over the US these past few weeks and it hasn’t let me down one bit, its TruBrite 15.4 inch screen is great for watching movies and even though it doesn’t have a Blu-Ray player built in, standard DVD’s look great. I even attached an external Blu-Ray plextor drive to it and the quality was amazing. The only thing that sucked about the screen is that it isn’t 16:9 it’s 16:10 so you get the black bars at the top and bottom when watching a movie, but that really isn’t a big deal.

Sound quality was also pretty impressive, if you have used a notebook before you may have noticed that even when the volume is all the way up, the sound may not be clear, or there is too much bass, but on the L300D the sound although not as crystal clear as you’d want it was pretty damned good and I was able to enjoy movies with and without a headset.

I used the system a lot in bed, and it is probably one of the coolest running systems I have, it was never uncomfortable to have on my lap touching my bare skin, the fans also didn’t seem to be running every second the system was on, so it was a rather quiet notebook even when plugged in.

Since I traveled a lot these past few weeks I was able to test the battery life and I averaged 3 to 4 hours, of course I the battery wasted quickly when watching movies, but writing emails and browsing the web got me about 4 hours of life. Thankfully a lot of airports have public electrical outlets now.

The system is powered by an AMD Athlon X2 mobile processor, and those of you frequent HardwareGeeks.com readers know that I have had issues with this processor in the past, but I take everything back. Every negative thing I said is now out the window, the chip performed well even during a heavy duty workload.

The system also has an ATI Radeon X1250 video card built into the system that works great. I played WoW, The Sims 2, and Sim City Societies, and while I couldn’t put the settings for the game at High like I can with my desktop, game play was pretty good and according to Fraps I averaged 22 frames per second, which is decent.

Overall the system is fantastic, and even though it’s a basic system it handled the work load I threw at it. While not perfect for gamers this system is great for a student on a budget, a small business owner, or just anyone who wants a basic system with a nice sized screen and with a starting price of $599 you can’t go wrong. For that we award it out 5 Star Kick Ass award for August 2008.