Toshiba Satellite E105-S1802 Laptop Review

Laptops — By Ricky on November 29, 2009 at 3:05 am

A good mid range laptop which is marred by the low volume speakers.

Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Good keyboard and touchpad, two year warranty.

Thumbs Down:

Bad speakers.

Inside the Trunk:

Power cables, Softwares.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Processor
Intel Core 2 Duo P7450 / 2.13 GHz, Data bus speed
1066 MHz, Chipset – Intel 45GM Express, L2 cache 3MB, 4 GB DDR 2 RAM (not expandable) Graphics Processor – Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, 500 GB SATA hard drive,

DVD+/-RW – CD / DVD read speed – 24x (CD) / 8x (DVD), CD / DVD write speed -
24x (CD) / 8x (DVD) / 5x (DVD-RAM) / 4x (DVD Double layer)

Memory card reader interfaces
2xUSB 2.0 – USB 2.0, 1xe-SATA, 1x SPDIF , 1x HDMI, 1xHeadphones, 1xMicrophone, 1x Ethernet – RJ-45

Other features
802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN, Camera, Fingerprint sensor, Bluetooth 2.1

Softwares Drivers & Utilities , Toshiba Disc Creator , Toshiba Recovery Media Creator, Norton AntiVirus, Toshiba ConfigFree, Toshiba DVD Player, Toshiba Hard Drive Impact Sensor, Toshiba PC Health Monitor, Hard Disc Recovery, Corel DVD MovieFactory, WildTangent, Microsoft Office Professional 2007, Toshiba ConfigFree Microsoft Works 9.0, Microsoft Office Ready.

Operating System Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium.

Toshiba satellite laptop reviews

Razzle Dazzle:

Toshiba Satellite E105-S1802 has the same looks like its predecessor Satellite E105-S1602. The chassis is the same; the vertical edges bring Apple MacBook Pro design to mind. The E105 chassis is covered in a silver–almost pewter–color with Toshiba’s “Fusion” finish, a pleasing, subtle pattern of pin stripes and the lines which are curved on the lid, the keyboard area, screen bezel, and the touch pad.

Inside Dope:

Toshiba Satellite E105-S1802 is a lot like its predecessor, Satellite E105-S1602 with only one change that is the OS. This model has Windows 7 and the earlier on had Windows Vista. But this laptop will cost more than the earlier model.

The display of the laptop is 14.1 inch big which gives a display resolution of 1280X800. The resolution is good as compared to the screen size but you will struggle when you have to tile two word processing documents side by side and work on them simultaneously, because the resolution is not large enough for it.

The keyboard provided is very comfortable to type on, normally keys are all cramped on keyboard since it is small in size, but we had no problems on this. Typing was smooth. There is also adequate backlighting on the keyboard so it won’t be a problem when you type in the dark. There is a strip of illuminated, touch sensitive media control buttons on the right of the keyboard. Usually these keys are placed on the top of the keyboard, since placing them on the sides will give less room for keys. But we were surprised that even with additional keys in the sides the main keyboard was quite good and there weren’t any mishits. Keyboard ergonomics is very important if you are going to type for long, a bad ergonomics keyboard tires you down quickly.

Below the keyboard is the track pad and it was great to use too. But you can always use desktop mouse if you are at home and want more comfort. The laptop has 500 GB hard disk for you to store all your files. It also comes with a DVD burner. But this computer is not good for gamming as it doesn’t have a good graphic card and the processor is slow too. Forget gamming even high end applications will bring this laptop down to its heels.

But the worst part of this laptop should be the speakers. The speaker is not up to the mark and you will struggle to listen to the audio even at full volume, or you will have to use a separate set of head phones. This is not all, the sound quality is also poor.

For connectivity, the laptop has three USB 2.0 ports, HDMI port and a multi format media card reader. There is also an eSATA port, a eSATA provides faster transfers than USB. The ‘e’ stands for external and it is so named because the connection provides data transfer as fast an internal SATA devices. But there is no firewire or ExpressCard slot.

The processor of this computer is 2.13 GHz Core 2 Duo P7450 processor and is based on Intel Centrino 2 technology. A slower processor is deliberately used to give you better battery life. A slower processor means that applications on this laptop will be slow and you can’t use this notebook for gamming. But then there is a trade off, a faster processor dries up the battery quickly but provides a fast performance, whereas a slow processor will make the battery last long but will run slow. The slow processor in this computer comes along with four GB DDR 2 RAM which is not expandable.

This laptop ran for about four and half hours in our test which is not the best but is pretty good.

Toshiba Satellite E105-S1802 is backed by a two year warranty as opposed to the one year warranty that other laptops have.

Nitty Gritty:

This device is a strict no-no if you want it for watching movies or music. The speaker quality is awfully low and you will have to look for head phones. But if you are not a movie bluff or a music enthusiast, then this laptop is good for light work.