Product Reviews

We've seen the A120 chassis before, most recently in What's New, Shopper March 2007. It's available in many different guises, and this latest version has a different specification, a lower price and comes with Windows Vista Business installed.

Vista Business has a number of advantages for the business user over Vista Home Premium. It has Windows Fax and Scan for sending and receiving documents, and Remote Desktop Connection is very useful if you want to work from multiple PCs as it enables you to remote control your notebook from another PC. There is also PC imaging software to protect your data from loss through computing error or accident.

Toshiba has designed the A120 to resist a wide variety of accidents. An acceleration sensor protects the hard disk by parking its heads if it detects falling or vibration, thus saving your data if you drop the notebook. The keyboard is spill-resistant, which is useful if you drink coffee while you work, and the motherboard is designed so that delicate components are away from the chassis' more vulnerable

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corners.

The notebook's layout isn't perfect, though. Most of the ports, including all three USB2 ports, are on the rear, which makes them hard to reach when plugging in a USB drive or external mouse. There's also a D-sub output, a CardBus slot and an SD memory card reader, though, which should prove sufficient for the business user.

The screen's anti-glare coating makes it suitable for use outdoors and under office lighting. The keyboard feels good and the keys are very responsive, so typing is comfortable. Anyone with very large fingers may find them a little small, though. The touch pad is accurate and has an unusual paper-like texture.

The battery lasted for almost three hours in our light-usage test, so you'll get most of an afternoon's worth of work out of it as long as you stick to office applications. Its Intel Core Duo T2600 processor is capable of dealing with far more demanding files than Word documents, but with only 512MB of RAM it was disappointing in our benchmarks. The spare memory slot means you could upgrade to 1GB for £25 or so.

The hard disk has a small 60GB capacity, and Vista Business takes up 10GB of that. Again, it's enough for office users but will quickly fill up if you start hoarding large media files. More disappointing is the CD-RW/DVD combo drive, which can read CDs and DVDs, but write only to CDs.

The A120 would benefit from more RAM and a DVD writer, both of which come with the cheaper Acer 5101AWLMi. However, it has a dual-core processor and Vista Business. This, and features such as the hard disk protection, make it great value for business users on the move.