Toshiba Satellite A210

Toshiba Satellite A210 is a good utility laptop for the average user’s need. It’s priced well and would be ideal as a second laptop or for those who need basic word processing and internet surfing capabilities.

Satellite A210 consists of an AMD Turion TL-60 processor and is run by the Windows Vista Home Premium Operating System. There is a 15.4” XGA TFT screen with this model from Toshiba. The laptop is equipped with an ATI Radeon X1200 graphics processing unit to take care of the basic graphics need. It consists of a 200 GB SATA hard disk drive that rotates at 4200 RPM which is on the inefficient side of the scale. 1 GB RAM in Toshiba A210 is just not enough to support the Vista Operating System. We will get into more on this later.

The laptop is delivered in a no fancy brown cardboard box. The bio-degradable packaging speaks a lot about the conscious effort of companies like Toshiba to keep the nature clean. There is no use of plastic whatsoever in packaging the notebook.

This Toshiba Satellite weighs about 6 lbs and has dimensions of 14.25” X 10.5” X 1.5”. It sports a sturdy look in line of the earlier Toshiba models. The base of the A210 laptop is strong and stable.

The TL-60 processor used in A210 is very efficient in terms of power usage. It’s comparable with most of the low end Core 2 Duo processors.

The 200 GB Hard Drive is a great place to store lots of information but then its slow rotational speed is the bottle neck for input and output performances.

LCD panel of Satellite A210 features TrueBright technology which is a fast becoming trend among the laptops made for the masses. The notable feature in the screen is its contrast. It makes watching videos an amazing experience.

As this laptop is aimed at the common man, it’s good to see that there is a 1.3 Megapixel web cam and a microphone. Nice additions for sure though they are nothing to die for. The sound output with an A210 is as good as in any other laptop in its range.

You will find some decent number of ports available with this laptop. It contains 5-in-1 media card reader, 4 pin fire wire port, one Express Card slot and USB 2.0 ports (4 in number).

Toshiba Satellite A210 runs on Windows Vista. Vista is very demanding in terms of resources and thus to an extent dwindles the performance of A210. SuperPi results are a testimony to the fact that the A2100 processing capabilities are no where near the latest offerings from Intel in the same segment.

The keyboard of Toshiba Satellite A210 is spongy and bilingual. The “Enter” key is not placed as it is conventionally done. So I would suggest you try out this laptop at the shop or at a friends place before you commit yourself to any financial expenditure to buy it.

Battery life is decent in A210 and there is not much problem with heat and noise as well under normal usage.

Overall this laptop is a good buy for your modest usage because you get good specifications for some real conservative pricing. The build quality is sturdy and it comes with complementary value added software. On the other extreme Toshiba Satellite A210 comes up with some unconventional placements of keys on the keyboard that might make you feel out of ease. Moreover the Windows Vista OS on this 1 GB machine affects the performance to a great extent.