REVIEW: Toshiba Equium L40-17M

If you're shopping for a notebook with bordered funds, then the Toshiba Equium L40-17M makes a decent compromise between features, price and working capabilities. With a price tag of just £429.99 and it still manages to pack in decent punch with an impressive amount of options.


Design


Design-wise, this is not an ugly duckling but it looks very basic rather than modish. You won't be humiliated to take this notebook out of the house but your friends are very much unlikely to be drooling with resentment. The keyboard gives real good-sized keys for ease of typing and the overall layout is sagacious, although it's soft and squishy in use. Weighing at nearly 3kg, the L40-17M isn't the slim fit to carry around with you all the time even if its going to provide decent battery life. Connectivity options are sparse, with just 3 USB ports offered.


Performance

With a price tag that is sub-£500, you can't be expecting the latest high spec ingredients, but the L40-17M makes the highest of what it's stuffed up with. You get a dual-core Pentium chip, It also comes with a RAM space of 2GB, which is very generous and assist the combo achieve a PCMark05 score of 3,269.

Its 15.4-inch display offers a bountiful space to work on and it has a nearly customary widescreen resolution of 1,280x800 pixels, showing up for a decent desktop area. The hard drive storage capacity stretches up to 120GB, Which reasonable space even though this is not the biggest on offer. The internal DVD writer assists in making backups without any problem.
It comes under-equipped when it comes to battery survivability. It only just manages to keep running for more than an hour when run on the intensive Battery Eater test.

Overall

Gaming out-of-the-way, the L40-17M is capable of most jobs you put it through. It might be on the slower side, but it will huff and puffs to get the job done. Packing a decent specification this notebook perched onto a sub-£500 package isn't an easy mission.

Pros

+ Decent Memory
+ Best buy at the sub $500 Notebook

Cons

- Poor Battery
- Slow Sprinter
- Very Basic


Value For Money

Our Rating