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Written by Sasa Pantelic
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Wednesday, 11 March 2009 |
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Page 2 of 3
To be quite honest, many of you won’t like the picture that we saw on this display when we turned off backlight. Picture had low contrast and colours were “weird” but, if you desperately need few more minutes of autonomy than this can be a life savior. Our tests proved that under these conditions (backlight was off) and in case you are doing some not so demanding tasks (like reading of some text or typing e-mail) autonomy, when it’s powered on battery, can be even 10 hours until battery becomes totally empty. This is really fascinating result.
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As expected there was not too much room for connectors so the list of those is short. We should mention one eSATA and 3 USB connectors (one has “sleep-and-charge” function). All ports are easily accessible because they are all placed on both sides.
This notebook is powered by Intel Core 2 Duo SU9300 “ultra-low voltage” CPU at 1.2GHz. Maybe this won’t bowl you over, but for notebook like this it is quite enough along side with integrated Intel graphics card (X4500MHD). Thanks to these “power saving” components, overall power consumption is low which resulted in impressive autonomy. Well, these results Portege R600 didn’t achieve only because of these components but also because of battery that has unusually high capacity. Interesting fact is that from 1.1kg of total weight of whole notebook, 0.3kg goes on battery.
Although CPU was optimized for low power consumption, it is obvious that small, low profile, fan cannot bear all that heat that is generated by CPU. Because of this, fan sometimes needs to work at maximum RPM and as side effect, higher noise levels can be noticed and heard. Luckily these notebooks will be rarely used for heavy calculations so this noise problem will not be that noticeable.
Since Portege R600 is suited for business users, it has 3G modem that allows users to have access to Internet almost anywhere. While testing this module we discovered that this model has one very interesting feature that wasn’t documented. Toshiba Portege R600 has GPS receiver! Immediately we installed Earth Bridge and Google Earth and while we were connected to wireless network, we tested the whole system. It worked immediately so we can say that by purchasing Portege R600 you get two devices for the price of one. For all this to function, you need to insert SIM card into 3G modem and install newest Toshiba Wireless Manager.
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We got our model with preinstalled Vista Business OS but on supplied CD are present also Windows XP drivers, so you have a choice. There are also numerous Toshiba applications and utilities. Three years of warranty is additional plus for this model.
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