Toshiba Satellite Pro L350

Toshiba Satellite Pro L350 Review

Beautiful glossy widescreen for watching movies .

Overview & Features

• PROS
  • Powerful enough processor
  • Beautiful glossy widescreen for watching movies
• CONS
  • cumbersome
  • No FireWire connectivity
  • Bad sound quality
  • Unimpressive battery life

Bottom Line:Promoted by Toshiba as a desktop alternative for the business class, the L350 is indeed decently powerful. But that power comes in a large and clunky package, without much incentive to be used as a mobile PC. Like using a filing cabinet as a paper weight, this laptop can certainly get the job done, but it takes up much more room than necessary.

Design

Meet Toshiba's L350 laptop computer from their Satellite Pro lineup, a budget computer for today's business professional. Today's laptop industry is stacked to the rafters with the newest trendy fashions and designer size notebooks which can fit into a purse or under your seat on a plane. Unfortunately for the L350, it's big and bulky casing delegates this computer to the desktop and not the backpack.

Size & Weight

Weighing in at about nine and a half pounds, fifteen inches across and roughly two inches thick, this laptop is a beast to lug around.

Aesthetically, the machine's plastic casing with a dull gray and black finish give it that bland professional appeal of an end-of-tax-season soir'e, or air-brushed aluminum siding. Nothing like the Lenovo u110 we just reviewed (as comparison in the picture) But hey, looks aren't everything, and the L350 is certainly not intended to promote PC envy.

Keyboard + Track Pad

The L350 features a full-size keyboard with a number pad and raised black, plastic keys. They're tactile enough and make it easy to avoid typing mistakes.

Below it is the Touch Pad, just slightly indented into the casing making it simple to find in the dark. However, the two mouse buttons below the track pad do not nest exactly below it, and the spacing can create some frustration when you keep missing them.

Above the keyboard are your standard media controls for playing DVDs with Windows DVD software (this laptop came loaded with XP, thankfully), flanked by twin speakers....

Speakers & Display

The speakers are unfortunate and are horrible sounding - distant and tinny would be describe the audio, which is a shame given the 17' diagonal TruBrite Widescreen glossy display, running natively at 1440x900 resolution. With basic brightness image controls on the F6 and F7 keys, movies don't look half bad!

Of course it does suffer from poor visuals when viewed from the top or at steep angles off to the sides, so any viewing should be done straight on.

ConnectivityRegrettably, this Satellite doesn't come with any impressive connections that might give it an edge over any other laptop on the market today.

The front houses a wireless on/off switch, multi-media card reader mic ' in / audio out, and that handy volume knob. There is also the LED status lights here, which provide user information about battery, charging, hard drive and power.

The left side is also simple ' a VGA output, exhaust fan, Etherenet port, two USB 2.0 ports and ExpressCard slot.

The right side has another USB 2.0 port, DVD-RW drive, power jack, and lock slot.

The rear ' the most simple, has the modem connection, and that's it. This laptop does not include a FireWire port, but does have a wireless interface that utilizes A/G/N ' but sadly, no internal Bluetooth option.

FeaturesDespite it's blas' exterior, the L350 proves that beauty IS only skin deep. Under the hood is a decent 160GB hard drive (well short of the 250gb in the M305 we just reviewed), with a 2.1 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor and 2 GB of SDRAM, so that CPA should have no problem running tax software. But without capable FireWire media inputs, it's not quite certain what else this computer is meant to be used for beyond business applications and moderate multimedia playback.

A built in microphone and webcam are present, again ' for moderate use and I wouldn't suggest them for anything other than simple video chatting, they almost seem like afterthoughts with a laptop that wouldn't know what to do with them.

The L350 comes with a DVD SuperMulti Optical Drive, capable of burning CD-R and DVD-RW discs. The drive pops out at the push of a button and runs pretty quietly - and that's pretty much it, not a whole lot to write home about.

Performance & ConclusionYou can read about our standard testing methodology HERE, but as noted, we do not perform 3d gaming tests on units with integrated graphics, so that portion of the test is omitted. Windows Experience Score:Since this laptop ships with (surprise!) Windows XP, we dont have a Vista Experience score to provide you.

PCMark05

3DMark06

It performed just the last "business" centric notebooks, and just for fun, we compare it to a 17" multimedia laptop. Yeah, it performed less than the F45, but right on track with the Lenovo 3000.

WorldBench 6 Beta 2

This number surprised us - it performed only 11 points behind the much more powerful Asus M70sa we just reviewed.

Battery Life:

The lithium-ion battery however, wasnt all that impressive for a 17 budget laptop, running for just under four hours during normal use, and two and a half with a DVD playing.

And those of you with chubby fingers (thanks for the genes, Dad) might want to grab a flathead screwdriver when switching the battery out. The push tabs on either side of the battery which release it are easy enough, but to prop the actual battery out you have to lift it with your finger via a thinly indented area thats somewhat difficult to get a hold of.

Conclusion

At a little over a $1000 purchase price, the Toshiba L350 Satellite Pro may be the laptop for you if you need a 17 laptop.If it's budget your aiming for, theM305 we just reviewed trumps this model in almost each and every way except for display (yes, including price). Compared with other laptops aimed at the same demographic like the Fujitsu Lifebook E8410- this islarger and bulkier than the Lifebook, but at a much reduced cost. The L350 costs just over $1000 depending on the retailer, whereas the Lifebook is going to hit you up for $1600.

I was left less than impressed for a 17" notebook, but to be fair the Toshiba L350 Satellite Pro is a fine enough laptop for the cubicle bound business person. But for the commuter, student, artist, movie watcher or laptop enthusiast, there are plenty of better laptops out there that will be easier on the back if not on the wallet.