Toshiba Satellite Pro A120SE Review
April 15, 2007 | Computer, Notebook, Toshiba | 1 CommentSatellite Pro A120SE is the latest addition to Toshiba’s well known family of business notebooks. The system lies an Intel Core Solo CPU, the T1350. Clocked at 1.86GHz it has an FSB speed of 533MHz and 2MB of L2 cache.

If your budget allows it, the first job should be to upgrade this machine to at least 512MB because it has only 256MB of PC2-533MHz DDR2 memory, which is very poor for a laptop these days, even a basic one like the Satellite Pro A120SE. The performance of the Satellite Pro A120SE isn’t going to set the world on fire; it scored just 130 in SYSmark 04SE.
Despite its budget price it has the usual Toshiba build quality, and even includes a feature normally found on more expensive notebooks; hard drive protection. If you drop the Satellite Pro A120SE, sensors in the hard drive park the drive heads to keep them out of harm’s way. It’s not the lightest of laptops, though, weighing in at just over 3kg including the AC adapter.
Toshiba has used a 15.4-inch WXGA widescreen display for the Satellite Pro A120SE, which has a native resolution of 1,280 pixels by 800 pixels and, unlike most of today’s laptops, has a matt finish so you don’t get those annoying screen reflections.
But the usual suspects are all there when it comes to connecting the Satellite Pro A120SE to the outside world; 802.11b/g wireless, 56Kbps modem and, surprisingly, a Gigabit Ethernet LAN port. There are three USB 2.0 ports but no Firewire port.
Keeping to a budget obviously means cutting down on features and other aspects of the specification. You get a 60GB hard disk and the optical drive is only a CD-RW/DVD combo unit, so if you want to back up the drive properly you’ll need some other form of backup device.
There is a flash card reader but this only supports SD and MMC cards and there is no Express Card slot, just a standard PC Card slot, although this isn’t a problem as there isn’t exactly a multitude of Express cards to choose from yet.
Despite the slow speed of the processor and the integrated graphics, the battery life isn’t exceptional, just under four hours doing office apps and just over two hours when playing a DVD.
It may be a budget notebook but Toshiba knows better than most the area of the market to which it is targeted, hence the useful features such as the spill protection and, more importantly, the hard drive protection.
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