Toshiba Tecra 8100 review

Toshiba's latest addition to its Tecra range is intended as a general-purpose corporate workhorse, which is reflected in its main features. Down in the engine room you'll find a 500MHz mobile Pentium III, flanked by the typical corporate notebook portion of 64Mb of RAM and a 6Gb hard disk. A CD-ROM is standard rather than the racier DVD drive, and the TFT screen has a 13.3in diagonal.

Right at the outset, this raises questions about the high price. The list price is £1,995, which is pretty steep for what is no more than a basic spec. When you compare it to the corporate-friendly Dell Latitude CPx H500GT (reviewed issue 65, p154), which includes a 14.1in screen, 128Mb of RAM as standard, and costs £1,794 (with no modem), it certainly seems over-priced. If you want to add 64Mb more RAM to the Tecra at a later date, it will cost £155, but at least this should be easy as there's a second memory socket free. Access is a simple matter of removing a panel from the underside of the case, and the hard disk is also readily removable, with a single screw keeping it securely in place.

Physically, the new Tecra is what you'd expect from Toshiba - a sound and well-engineered design. The case feels built to last, the battery pack locks firmly into place, the power stud is protected by a sliding cover - often, and unwisely, omitted from other machines - and any dust flaps are either recessed out of harm's way or have durable hinges. I also noticed a circular impact shield judiciously placed on the underside of the case to better protect the hard disk from an accidental bashing. If something does go wrong, Toshiba includes a three-year UK and international return-to-base warranty, which is favourable to the one-year with the Dell Latitude.

The notebook is reasonably compact and its two-spindle construction means the weight has been kept down. With its CD-ROM drive installed, the Tecra weighs a respectable 2.6kg. This means it's a lot more portable than the 4kg monsters we sometimes see, but it's no match for the 1.9kg Fujitsu Siemens LifeBook S-4510 (reviewed issue 67, p154). If you add in the PSU and external floppy disk drive, the Tecra weighs 3.55kg.

Toshiba has opted for drive modules to keep things flexible, so you can swap the CD-ROM for a floppy drive and vice versa, and there are the usual options, including DVD, a second hard disk or a second battery pack. The system is supplied with an external adaptor that lets you run the floppy drive when there's something in the multipurpose bay, but unlike some I've seen it isn't hot-swappable. If you elect to stick with the multipurpose bay, you can hot-swap with the aid of a utility tucked away in Control Panel.

There's an expansion bus for use with Toshiba's NetDock Port Replicator, which incorporates a 10/100Mbits/sec Ethernet adaptor, and the notebook itself has USB and a composite video output, along with the usual collection of ports. There's also a V.90 fax modem built into the machine, providing comms straight from the box without costing you the use of either of the two PC Card slots.

When I first saw the Tecra, I assumed it had a metal alloy lid, as the contrasting grainy silver finish used for the part gives that impression. I wasn't wildly happy to subsequently discover that this was no more than a cosmetic applied to a standard plastic moulding. What's more, the lid wasn't particularly strong, and the wrong sort of impact could easily damage the screen below. The screen itself runs in XGA resolution, but its rather modest 13.3in diagonal means it isn't quite as readable as a 14.1in panel.