Toshiba Satellite A305-S6845

The notebook's sleek, futuristic design truly stands out. Our eyes were drawn to the reflective, gunmetal gray case (courtesy of Toshiba's new Fusion finish), which has a horizon pattern running along most of the lid and palm rest. Of course, all of this shininess comes with a price the unit smudges all too easily. Within a week of typing on the large, comfortable keyboard, the machine was covered in so many fingerprints and palm marks that it looked like an oft-handled sample unit in a big electronics store.

Thankfully, the notebook's bright and gorgeous 15.4 inch wide screen display, which runs at a native resolution of 1,280x800 (meaning it supports high definition playback at 720p), makes all those smudges easier to bear. It's certainly pleasant on the eyes, and the glossy screen never gets distracting when you're surfing the Web or watching a film on the machine's DVD�RW drive, which features Label flash disc labeling technology. The sound system deserves special mention, as the Harman Kardon speakers delivered heavy, bassy audio that sounded as good as what you'd expect to hear out of a decent pair of desktop speakers.

Toshiba further emphasizes this system's media playback talents with a row of media control touch buttons running above the keyboard. Also noteworthy for a laptop in this price range is the inclusion of a pair of 200GB hard drives, instead of a single drive.

One spins at 5,400rpm, while the other is a slower, 4,200rpm drive. The system blasted through our multimedia benchmarks, scoring a 703 in Cinebench 9.5, and landing a 4,295 in Cinebench 10.

It cycled through our iTunes conversion test in 4 minutes and 20 seconds, and needed 7 minutes and 17 seconds to convert our Windows Media Encoder test files both good scores for a media machine.

Better yet, the system's 9 cell battery lasted 2 hours and 30 minutes in our demanding DVD rundown test. While the 9 cell battery is not standard the system usually comes with a 6 cell battery and adds $149.99 to the unit's price, it's a worthy purchase for those who will be spending a lot of time away from a power outlet. We can't imagine wanting to carry this system around much, however, it was difficult to fit into a standard laptop bag, and its 6.5 pound weight makes lugging it on a hot day almost unbearable.

The Satellite A305-S6845 uses a 2.1GHz Core 2 Duo T8100 processor with 3GB of memory, which helped deliver good scores on our productivity benchmark tests 5,391 on Futuremark's PCMark05 and 3,032 on PCMark Vantage. What's more, the system's 3D performance was top notch for its price range. One of the system's biggest drawing points is its new 512MB ATI Mobility Radeon 3650 GPU, which earned the system a score of 3,870 on 3DMark06.

On our Company of Heroes DirectX 10 (DX10) test, the notebook kept the game running at an average of 31 frames per second (fps) at a 1,024x768 resolution with all the detail settings cranked up. The score dropped down to 26fps when the same test was conducted at the system's native resolution of 1,280x800 (though with lower detail settings, the Satellite kept the game moving at 49fps). In our F.E.A.R. DX9 test at the laptop's native resolution, we saw a more than respectable 42fps with all the detail settings enabled.