Toshiba Satellite Pro L550 Review

Toshiba has a reputation for making solid notebook computers at reasonable prices, and one of its latest and largest laptops, the Satellite Pro L550, is no exception.

The L550 (model EZ1702) lists for $999, with street prices from $850 to $950. It has sleek lines for a computer of its proportions (10.7 by 16.4 by 1.6 inches), thanks to a manufacturing process called in-mold rolling.

Its sober color scheme may lack the flashiness of some of its competitors, but it's still a handsome machine with its shiny graphite gray shell and "snow silver" interior deck. Keypads come in a choice of black (like our test unit) or gray (like the publicity photo below).

At one time, a notebook of the L550's magnitude would have been classified as a "lovable luggable." But even though the unit weighs seven pounds, it is eminently portable and, unlike its hulking progenitors, can be toted from room to room or from office to home without producing chiropractic problems.

Under the hood is Intel's Core 2 Duo T6670 processor, which was launched in the third quarter of last year. It's a dual-core with 2.2GHz clock speed, an 800MHz front-side bus, and 2MB of Level 2 cache. System memory is 4GB of DDR2, expandable to 8GB.

Despite the relatively robust processor and generous amount of memory, the L550's performance running Windows 7 Professional (64-bit) was only adequate, not peppy; there always seemed to be a smidgen of latency between the launching of some applications and appearance of program windows. On the other hand, multimedia applications -- DVD movies and music CDs -- performed well.

A possible culprit is the hard drive -- a 5,400-rpm workhorse rather than a 7,200-rpm speedster. In its favor, it has plenty of room -- 320GB, with 288GB usable.

Easy on the Eyes

The Satellite Pro has what Toshiba calls an HD+ TruBrite LED-backlit display. Its diagonal measure is an expansive 17.3 inches.

The LED technology is designed to be a power saver, and it seems to work: With a six-cell (4,000 mAh) lithium-ion battery, the notebook easily breached three hours of battery life. That's active battery life. You can close the unit's cover so it goes into sleep mode and return 30 minutes or so later without taking much of a power hit.

With a native resolution of 1,600 by 900 pixels and support for 720p HD video, DVD movies were real eye candy on the unit's wide screen.

The display is sharp, richly colorful, and bright, made even brighter by the LED's high-gloss finish. However, in some situations reflections in the screen can be distracting.

Unfortunately, the laptop's speakers aren't as arresting as its display; they have that tinny sound found on many notebook speakers. For a richer aural experience, listening should be performed through the L550's built-in headphone jack.

Sound can be captured by plugging a microphone into the laptop's mic jack or through its built-in mic, which complements a webcam centered at the top of the display's frame.

Input to the display is controlled by the Intel GM45 Express chipset's Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD integrated graphics. This technology doesn't have any dedicated graphics memory. That means it has to borrow some -- anywhere from 128MB to 1.3GB -- from the notebook's main memory to operate. The arrangement works well for most tasks; just don't try to play any high-powered games on the system.

Screen content can also be pumped out of the unit through built-in VGA and HDMI ports.

The L550 has a muscular optical drive. It supports 11 formats, so you'll have a tough time finding a CD or DVD it won't read and write to. Among the supported formats is DVD±R double-layer, which is good for burning feature-length movies on a single disc.

For its wireless capabilities, the notebook uses Intel's Wi-Fi Link 5100AGN, which supports the latest and fastest 802.11 draft-n as well as 802.11a and -g connections. Bluetooth is standard as well. That's good news for owners of fancy cell phones who like to synchronize information between their mobiles and their PCs.

Wired connections can be made through the unit's 10/100Mbps Ethernet port. There's also a modem, which is useful for sending and receiving faxes, as well as dialing phone numbers from a personal information manager such as Microsoft Outlook.

Room for All Ten Fingers

One advantage of a laptop the size of the L550 is there's no problem fitting a comfortable, full-sized keyboard into the unit. You won't find any pygmy keys or Fn-key chiclets on this clavier. Both shift keys and the Enter and Backspace keys are healthily proportioned. There's also a good-sized inverted-T cursor cluster and full-blown numeric keypad.

Above the QWERTY keys is a system control panel. It gives you direct control over such multimedia player functions as play, pause, next or previous track, and mute.

Below the keyboard is a two-button touchpad for navigating the Satellite's screen. Quick scrolling can be performed by gliding a finger along the right or bottom edge of the pad for vertical or horizontal scrolling, respectively.

In addition to two standard USB 2.0 ports, the L550 has a combination USB/eSATA port, which expands the types of peripherals that can be attached to the unit. At the front of the notebook is a card reader for transferring data to the Toshiba from Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, and Memory Stick flash modules.

The software collection included with the L550 won't take anyone's breath away. There are some Toshiba applications, including a hard disk recovery utility; 30-day trials of Norton Internet Security 2009 and Microsoft Live Essentials; and a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office 2007.

Professionals who are chained to a desk but don't want to be chained to a desktop will find the Satellite Pro L550 a very capable machine. It more than fulfills its mission of offering desktop power in a portable package.