Toshiba Tecra M8-S8011

The Tecra M8-S8011's gunmetal gray exterior is neutral. It's more interesting looking than the Lenovo ThinkPad T61 Widescreen, yet it isn't as colorful as the consumer oriented Dell Inspiron 1420.

The Tecra M8-S8011's 4.5 pounds frame is made for the road, as well as for those who don't want to sacrifice too much screen real estate. Its 13.3 inch TruBrite screen is large enough to handle big workloads and is a sight to behold when displaying videos and photos.

Although the screen doesn't have a matte finish to fend off glare, like the screen on the HP Compaq 6910p, it's fine for office-related tasks. The full size keyboard could stand a little tuning for better resistance, but frequent users will adjust to it without any difficulty.

If the keyboard experience is critical, the Lenovo T61 Widescreen is the wiser choice because its keyboard is the best in the industry. Interestingly enough, the Tecra M8-S8011's touch pad is slightly recessed from the palm rests, which makes the touchpad feel smaller than it actually is.

Not too long ago, corporate laptops provided just basic features. The Tecra M8-S8011 is one model that gives you a much wider range of media capabilities. A 5 in 1 (MMC, MS, MS Pro, SD, xD) media card reader encourages you to bring your digital camera on the road.

A FireWire port lets you connect with video camcorders and external storage devices. A 1.3 mega pixels web-cam is handy for videoconferencing through Skype, MSN Messenger, and other chat clients.

The Tecra M8-S8011 also sports a dual layer DVD burner, something we're seeing more and more on business laptops these days. Security features aren't overlooked, either. A fingerprint reader is wedged between the mouse buttons, and an accelerometer senses sudden motion on the 120GB hard drive and parks the drives heads off to the side of the platters to keep the drive from danger.

I don't have a problem with this configuration if a business is running Windows XP Pro, because the 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 CPU and 1GB of RAM are up to the task. At retail, however, this system is sold with Windows Vista Business. With all of Vista's 3D requirements and the fact that this system loads integrated graphics, which suck up system memory, 2GB of RAM should really be the minimum.

SYSmark 2007 Preview scores couldn't quite catch up to those of the Dell Vostro 1500 and the HP Compaq 6910p, both of which load 2GB of RAM and faster processors. Photoshop scores were in the 2 minutes range. Scores would improve drastically with more memory.