Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 Review

Everything in Its Place

The silver-and-gray Satellite Pro wins some kind of award for the most efficient cramming of ports and switches onto the back and sides of a laptop. (The front is plain except for stereo speakers, though you'll notice the 802.11b antenna built into the lid.)

On the left, you'll find the two PC Card slots, the power button (with a sliding lock above it so a laptop accidentally bumped in your briefcase won't be turned on, at least not unless it's bumped twice in the right places), and an on/off switch that saves battery power when you're not using the WiFi adapter.

The rear offers two USB ports, parallel and serial ports, a PS/2 mouse/keyboard port, and RGB and composite video-out ports, as well as the AC adapter jack. A rubber cover conceals a bus connector for Toshiba's optional, overpriced ($329) NoteDock IV port replicator. And both the 1.44MB floppy and DVD/CD-RW drives are on the right side, as are RJ-11 modem, RJ-45 Ethernet, and infrared ports plus headphone and microphone jacks and the volume dial.

Removing a couple of screws and a plastic panel gives access to two PC100 SODIMM memory slots on the system's underside; since a 128MB module occupies one slot, you can expand the system to 384MB without throwing away or 512MB if you toss the supplied SDRAM. (During May 2001, if you buy the Satellite Pro from Toshiba's Web site, you get a bonus 128MB Kingston memory module, for a system total of 256MB, plus free shipping -- Ed.) The 20GB, 4,200-rpm Enhanced IDE hard disk is officially listed as "service removable" rather than user-swappable.

The Satellite Pro follows other Toshibas' slightly soft or mushy but very comfortable keyboard layout, with full-sized Home, PgUp, PgDn, and End keys arranged vertically at the far right and the mendacious Microsoft Windows keys exiled to the half-sized top row of function keys instead of getting in the way of the Alt keys and space bar.

Like IBM, Toshiba favors a mini-joystick or pencil-eraser pointing device instead of a touch pad; the AccuPoint II is paired with large left and right (upper and lower) mouse buttons and two smaller buttons for scrolling up and down.

The 4600's lithium-ion battery recharges in three hours with the computer off. To eke the most out of a charge, not only Intel's CPU-slowing SpeedStep but Toshiba's own control-freak control panel lets you specify different screen brightnesses, hard disk timeouts, and other options for different levels of battery power.

But the bottom line was a letdown, as we never saw more than 2 hours and 10 minutes' use in our real-world mix of office work and multimedia play -- that's understandable for a laptop with so many power-hungry frills, but on the skimpy side for one this heavy (or for would-be in-flight movie-watchers).

Skip To Page 1 A Business-Class Lapful • 2 Everything in Its Place 3 A Performance Pro (But Not a Player) 4 The Bottom Line and Sibling Rivalry

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