Toshiba Satellite L300 - only if you can ignore the headaches

And I mean, really only if you can ignore them. This review of the Toshiba Satellite Pro L300 EZ1004X, or test, or call however you want, will not convince you about to buy this notebook, the contrary: I would recommend this Satellite only for my foes.

First impressions about the Toshiba Satellite Pro L300

Why did Toshiba release this notebook? It was a must: the ever dropping prices of the notebook PCs forced Toshiba to release a notebook which fits in the cheap category. Its price is low, just as its performance.
The Toshiba Satellite’s case is borrowed from the higher-end notebooks, thus it’s very neat. It’s made of hard plastic, its touch is very cool for some reason. The keyboard is standard notebook keyboard with the standard “Fn” key to access the 3rd functions of some keys. And here comes the first issue with the laptop: the Fn key won’t work if you don’t have appropriate drivers installed. Imagine DOS environment, you think the display is too dark and want to make it brighter. Forget it, your only solution is to switch the lamp on in the room you are in.
Or better not, because the Satellite L300 doesn’t have anti-glare layer on the WXGA display, thus it functions just like a mirror.

Hardware performance of the Toshiba Satellite Pro L300

The processor of the Toshiba Satellite L300 is an Intel Pentium Dual Core T2370, working at 1.7 GHz on full load. The front side bus works at 533 MHz and has 1MB of cache. So, the processor is a high performance gadget, and also an extremely neat thing if you want to heat up your room. Playing a game, for example World of Warcraft resulted an incredible processor temperature, around 70 degrees Celsius. You might argue that this is not much at all, but if you’d tested the notebooks I tested before this one, you’d be convinced that this is much.
The Toshiba Satellite L300 is shipped with 1GB of RAM, and an Intel GMA X3100. The interesting thing about the Intel GMA X3100 is that you have to install the appropriate and specific drivers before you can set how much VRAM would you like it to use. Normally, under Vista it will use up to 358MB, value decided by Vista, not the user. Under XP it varies between 8 MB (yeah, eight) and 128MB. I’m not sure how XP decided how much to use, I didn’t get it yet. First it used 8Megs, then on the next boot it decided to use 128, than back to 8. Like Russian roulette: you never know what you get.
Viewing a HD (720p) movie was painless on the other hand. The 24/25 FPS limit was reached always so all I saw was flawless play.
Gaming on the other hand, you can forget from the start. I tested the Toshiba Satellite L300 with The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, World of Warcraft and Counter Strike. I tested so you won’t have to. It can be very dangerous, especially Counter Strike. As soon as I pushed a button, the game freeze, basically it started to think for a long time, making the playing and the quitting a pain. WoW was better a bit, but I wouldn’t recommend. Oblivion freeze at the very beginning, so that wouldn’t run either.

Various operating systems and the Toshiba Satellite Pro L300

The Satellite L300 I got came with Vista Home Premium already installed. After I turned it on, the first impression was that it’s extremely noisy. Very noisy. The hard disk was the faulty and as I later observed, if you access a directory on the hard disk which has many files, the hard disk becomes even noisier.
Installing XP happened without any issue. This doesn’t mean later didn’t appear problems. The only thing which was recognized by XP was the camera integrated in the case. Not that it was a problem. A quick browsing on the manufacturer’s website resulted all the possible drivers for XP.

The verdict on the Toshiba Satellite Pro L300

Its price is still lower than a HP’s, around $500-$600 + VAT, and this will be falling rapidly. The price doesn’t mean the Toshiba Satellite L300 is a “must buy”, it’s exactly the opposite. If you are my foe, buy it, else do not. The battery lasts for only about one hour whatever you do, it’s noisy, slow and a heat pad also comes handy.

Its usage asks for some basic things: if you are a smoker, get a pack of cigs, in addition you will need a pack of Aspirins too, to calm the headache down.

Do you have a Toshiba L300 notebook? What do you think about it?

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