Digital Trends

Toshiba Satellite M305 May 13th, 2008 | by Ian Bell

Use and Testing

The out of the box the package includes the notebook computer, power adapter, recovery CD and a handy setup guide printed on thick paper. It describes how to get started and depicts a visual walk around of the system showing what’s on the each side and what all the buttons do. An accessory catalog is in the box as well.

We pressed the power button and it booted to the Vista desktop in 1 minute and 5 seconds, which is par for the course for an OEM Vista build.

Once we got to the desktop we were immediately appalled at the number of icons present, indicating bloatware on an unprecedented scale. Not surprisingly, the Toshiba Qosmio we recently reviewed was similar, so this seems to be standard operating procedure for Toshiba, and it’s a shame. Though it’s common for large builders such as Toshiba to bundle all this crapware with their PCs, it doesn’t mean we have to like it.

We resized the desktop to 800x600 for this shot, but you get the drift – lots of bloatware is included.

Speaking of bloatware, a lot of people claim it hurts system performance and while that may be true in some instances we didn’t experience it with the M305. Vista performance was snappy and responsive, and we didn’t experience any problems. Our main gripe is that it takes up disk space and slows the boot time. This notebook only had 204GB of free space out of 231GB total right out of the box, which is a lot, but that means the install of Vista and the rest of the applications is taking up 27GB of space, which seems egregious. It also slowed the boot time by about 20 seconds, which isn’t that bad but faster is always better.

General performance

As we noted, the notebook “felt” perfectly fine to our hands and eyes. Clicking windows and opening programs was a speedy process, as they would open in a second or two. We never once thought the notebook was chugging along or in need of more RAM or a similar speed boost. It’s Windows Experience Index score is a mid-range 3.4, which is what we expect from a machine of this caliber and price. Its score was primarily dragged down by its onboard Intel graphics, which are fine for casual games but not for 3D titles. We tried to run PCMark Vantage to get a feel for its overall performance but the program repeatedly crashed for some unknown reason. We’ve experienced this exact same problem on other systems and attribute it to something in PCMark rather than the system, but in general this is a midrange laptop – it’s not designed for hardcore gaming or video editing, but rather general desktop and office productivity, and for those tasks we feel it has adequate power and speed.

Usage and Comfort

We’ve always liked the feel of Toshiba’s notebook keyboards, and the m305 is similarly comfortable. We weren’t sure if the glossy black paint on the keys would have a negative impact on their feel and are happy to report it doesn’t. The keyboard feels spacious and is very easy to type on for extended periods. The only thing that bothered us just a smidgen is the fact that the left-and-right click buttons below the touchpad are hard plastic and clicking them takes just a bit more effort than we’d like, but it’s nowhere near as bad as the Asus U6S we recently tested.

We really liked the soft-touch media buttons though. They live up to their name and require just a light touch to initiate the intended action. We also like their soft white glow too, as it adds a nice touch of elegance to the notebook. We also liked that the speakers can get very loud, though they offer no bass response whatsoever.