Hardware Geeks

Last week I was able to get my hands on the Toshiba Protégé R600-S4202 and man like Protégé R500 before it, it is one sexy machine. Its sleek small form factor design makes it the lightest and most stylish notebook around; it is also the thinnest notebook with an optical drive.

While the R600 is a beautiful machine, I have said in a previous review, elegance and portability means nothing if it doesn’t have the power to do day to day task. But with its Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 Processor (1.4 GHz), 3 Gigs of Memory and 128 MB solid state drive, the R600 promises to be a workhorse.

So one of the first things if not the very first thing I did after I unboxed the R600 was, to turn it on. “DUH”. After I turned it on I kind of chuckled shut it down and turned it on again, because I thought I heard something that I thought was hilarious. I did hear what I thought I heard. What I heard was I guess the fan spinning and it sort of sounded like a Ferrari revving up.  I felt as if the R600 was challenging me for doubting its potential.

So after the Rev Up I logged into Windows (The R600 comes with Vista), I was impressed by the boot up time, very fast. I then installed Office 2007. It had to be one of the fastest if not the fastest installs of Office 2007 Ultimate I ever experienced, it took a little over 5 minutes to install but still fast considering the size of Office.
After I installed Office I fired up word, and I have to give the SSD drive credit here, it loaded almost instantly. Yes there was a splash screen, but on my desktop or any other machines that I have used including the HP Envy 133, word did not open up that quickly.

I decided to keep on testing the speed of the R600 with Office programs, so I opened up a really large word document I have that is nearly 7 MB in size, the file basically contains a lot of images, graphs and clip art. Most machines I have struggle when opening it, word on occasion has crashed when opening this particular file, but most of the time it just locks up for a minute or two while the file loads. On the R600 the machine did not struggle at all, word looked as if it locked up for a brief moment but it loaded the document quickly. I was really impressed by that considering I have seen some machines take a few minutes to open that document. I also tested it with some large excel files I have and it handled those with ease.

The next thing I tested with the R600 was its portability, I had a trip to Orlando to do a Zero G flight with Symantec and decided to take it with me. I flew Delta which offers Wi-Fi on most of their MD-80’s and lucky for me my flight from JFK to Orlando was onboard one of these Wi-Fi enabled aircraft. After getting onto the plane and hearing the 4 dongs that indicate it is safe to use portable electronic devices, I watched as everyone who went for their notebook in the overhead bins struggle to get theirs out. I on the other hand had no issue pulling out the R600. It was even small enough to fit in the seat pocket in front of me. It fit a bit too well and I didn’t like keeping it there as I was worried I would forget to take it out when we landed.

I have to give props to Delta here also; the internet experience at 30,000 feet was amazing, no noticeable lag and a constant solid connection. It was so good of a connection that it allowed me to take advantage of the built in webcam on the R600 to have a quick webcam chat with a friend.

While in the air I did more than just browse the web, I watched a movie, well half of a movie as the flight was a short one. The screen is not the best for viewing movies on but it is good enough to view movies on and I have no real complaints about it.

Before I forget I have to mention the battery life, I purposely left the charger in NY when I went to Orlando. I only used the notebook while in my hotel room and while on the plane, but it lasted the entire weekend on 1 battery. I never shut the machine off but I did close its lid. I say it had about 3 hours of actual use.
After returning to NY I tested the battery again after fully charging it, and I was able to get 3 hours and 43 minutes of battery life. I used the notebook none stop for that amount of time, I browsed the web viewed a few YouTube videos and even changed my facebook status a few times.

Overall the R600-S4202 is an amazing piece of machinery, it’s stylish, portable and powerful and perfect for the professional on the go and because of this for the 3rd consecutive year it has won our 5 Star “Best for Mobile Professionals” award.

The R600-S4202 and other models of the R600 and A600 are available directly from ToshibaDirect.com. The R600-S4202 has a starting price of $2999.

Post Tags: review  toshiba  notebook  r600  protege r600 

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