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Written by Sasa Pantelic
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Wednesday, 14 January 2009 |
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Page 1 of 3  Good business notebook should be lightweight, reliable, fast and with long autonomy and good quality. Toshiba built Tecra R10 for business users that travel a lot and we will see if Toshiba fulfilled its goal.
At first sight Toshiba Tecra R10-10S doesn’t look tough. This impression is consequence mostly because of slim and flexible cover. Surprisingly, even under severe bending of cover, there was no picture distortion. After thorough inspection we concluded that toughness and quality of Tecra R10 aren’t that bad. Although if you expected casing that can withstand extreme punches you will be slightly disappointed.
Almost all surfaces on this notebook are made of matte grey plastics. Only screen frame is black. Front side has unusual, aerodynamic, shape that resembles of sport car’s front bumper. This shape makes this notebook much more interesting than usual squarish shaped notebooks that are dominating on the business notebook market. Beside esthetics, this shape is more ergonomic because palm rest allows more natural hand position. Palm rest surface is made of aluminum with shine finish. We found this decision very strange because this surface is constantly in contact with hands and gets dirty very easy.
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Keyboard bends a little in the middle, but overall quality of keyboard is good and it is real pleasure to type on it. One more feature of this keyboard is resistance on fluid that can be spilled over it. Power button location is problematic: near the Escape key. Below power button are located two additional buttons. First one is used for launching Toshiba Assist application that allows users to use faster and more efficiently all potentials of this notebook. Additional software is divided in four categories with last one called Optimize: boot options, CPU clock optimization, custom button functions etc. Second button (Presentation) can be used to start Windows Mobility Center. Function of both buttons can be customized.
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Tecra R10 comes with ton of preinstalled software that we found to be, mostly, totally unnecessary. Of course there are few good applications so we suggest you to look at those applications and eliminate unnecessary ones if you decide to acquire Tecra R10. One of useful applications is Toshiba TEMPO that will alert you if there are some news considering your notebook model. Besides news about new software and driver versions you will also get info how to take advantage of all possibilities of your notebook. Face recognition software can recognize you when you sit in front of your notebook, but since quality of integrated webcam isn’t best suited for that role, you shouldn’t rely only on that security setting. Another interesting application is Toshiba PC Health Monitor that will show you changes in your system settings in real-time.
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