Product Reviews

Budget laptops are nothing new, but when was the last time you saw one from a big-name manufacturer that left you with change from £500? Toshiba's Satellite Pro M50 is just that. It has an unassuming, business-like look and on first inspection, seems to be nothing to write home about either. It has all the basics of a Centrino laptop, but no extras, such as a Bluetooth or a memory card reader. Not everyone wants an all-singing, all-dancing powerhouse they can take on the train, though. If you only need a laptop for office-type applications, the internet and email, then Toshiba's new laptop could be just the ticket.

Small screen

The compromise that's most immediately apparent is the Toshiba's TFT screen - it has widescreen proportions, but with a diagonal of just 14in, it's less than panoramic. It's rare to see a screen that measures less than 15in on anything but an ultra-portable these days, but its resolution of 1280 x 768 is a reasonable amount of Desktop space. The image is crisp, but colours weren't vibrant as we'd prefer, even with the brightness on full. The backlight was a little uneven too, with the image appearing noticeably darker towards the left and edges of the screen. This was actually due to its limited

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viewing angles and as soon as we moved more than 30 degrees from face-on, the image effectively disappeared. The lacklustre display also meant that watching DVD movies wasn't quite the relaxing experience we'd hoped for either. Each time the lighting changed in a new scene, we couldn't help but fiddle with the screen's brightness. Audio was better though, and the stereo speakers made a good stab at both movie soundtracks and audio CDs.

Inside the laptop

A 40GB hard disk is rather meagre these days and you'll need to be careful with the programs you install on the Satellite Pro if you're not to run out of space. For example, after installing a handful of programs during testing, we found we were left with just 26GB of free space. A dual-layer DVD writer means that you always have the option to archive files to disc should the need arise, but that's not something you'd want to do on a regular basis.

One thing that won't be cluttering this machine's hard disk is games. Its ATI Radeon Xpress 200M graphics chipset is decidedly entry-level, so despite supporting DirectX 9, the Toshiba can't really do much with it. This is hardly a complaint though - this is a £470 laptop, after all.

We mentioned at the start that the Satellite Pro is best suited for office-type tasks and this is based on both its near-non-existent 3D graphics capability and so-so 2D performance. Its benchmark score of 28% is rather unimpressive, but remember that 100% is the score of a desktop PC with a scorching Athlon 64 3500+ processor, so it's not as bad as all that. A bigger limitation is 256MB of memory and spending £30 or so on doubling this (there's one free memory slot) would reap huge dividends. That said, there are better specified and performing laptops around for a similar price, so we'd suggest shopping around.