The Satellite E200 is supposed to be under the category of thin-and-light notebooks and though I agree with the thin part, I don’t think the 2.24kg weight is something we can call light.
The laptop has a glossy finish all over, from the lid cover to the body and the palm rests with some pattern underneath. The body is a bit thick at the base and tapers off towards the front giving it somewhat of a clam-shell look.
The full-sized keyboard features large island-type keys and is a bit flushed to the left leaving a small area on the right side for a touch panel to control volume and LCD brightness. The keyboard is also back-lit and automatically activates when typing on the keys.
Its got a wide enough trackpad with a textured surface to separate it from the palm rest. The click buttons are positioned at the front edge and also tapers off which makes it a little harder to use at times.
The numerous ports are peppered around the sides but barely fits due to the thin design — an HDMI port, eSATA, USB ports and multi-card reader.
The 14-inch transflective display is bright and crisp with a resolution of 1366×768 pixels. The glare and fingerprint smudges that’s attracted by the screen is very common to glossy displays; that and the entire surface of the laptop too.
The specs on this rig is above average to great, depending on where you are coming from — starting off with the trio of the CPU + GPU + RAM. See complete specifications below.
Toshiba Satellite E200 specs:
Intel Core i5 520M @ 2.4GHz (2 cores, 4 threads)
4GB Dual-Channel DDR3 RAM
NVidia GeForce 310M 512MB RAM
500GB SATA HDD
WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
Bluetooth 2.1
HDMI port
eSATA port
2 x USB 2.0 ports
DVD+RW
5-in-1 card reader
6-cell Li-Ion battery
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
The thin design might have also prompted Toshiba to use a slot-loading optical drive to fit the body.
Performance is impressive with the Core i5 520M getting a sub-score of 6.7 on Windows Experience Index. The system got an over-all base score of 5.0 taken from the graphics card.
Results of PassMark benchmarks are as follows:
PassMark Performance Test:
CPU Mark: 2751.9
2D Graphics Mark: 271.0
3D Graphics Mark: 285.0
Memory Mark: 1024.2
Disk Mark: 396.8
PassMark Rating: 938.5
Been using the unit to play Starcraft 2 and I’m doing just fine with medium to medium-high settings. As for battery life, I am able to pull off close to about 4 hours on this unit running on Eco Mode but regular use can easily drop that to just over 2 hours. BatteryBar gives it a 3 and three-quarters of an hour rating.
The Toshiba Satellite E200 Special Edition comes in a nice, attractive design, good built and pretty decent specs. It’s not something you’d like to carry around because of the weight but it will pass as a good workhorse machine. I’m just not sure if a lot of people will be willing to shell out the funds once they discover the price tag that comes along with it.
Estimated retail price in stores is about Php75,000. A bit way above the usual price of other brands in this configuration but Toshiba’s additional touch in the design and built of the unit might convince a few folks to pick this one over the others.
