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- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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6 out of 6 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Ultralight, ultra-teriffic!"
Pros: Super light weight, long battery life
Cons: low-ish processor speed, expensive extras
Summary: As I sit here, writing this review on the R200 I cannot help but be amazed by it's small size and superb quality.
The R200's features genuinely enhance the fun and experince of using this ultraportable. The Biometric finger print reader makes logging in a breeze, and the Toshiba power-saving features such as display brightness control and processor speed auto-adjusting features extends the batter life out to a practical 4.25 hours of real-time use.
Speaking of the display, it is crisp, sharp and bright on the highest setting, but is often too dim on the lowest. So those with poor eyesight may want to sacrifice battery longevity for brightness and quality.
While the base model of the notebook is sufficient for the average traveling user, there are some essential accessories that will make the R200 your nearest and dearest companion on the road. I highly recommend adding an additional 1 Gigabyte of the R200's PC3200 SODIMM DDR2 RAM to give the R200 a maximum of 1.25 Gigabtyes, this will reduce the loading time for most applications and cut down on the wait time before you can get to work - less waste on the battery.
Additionally, the track pad is robust but is a littel too small for those of us with larger digits, so it would be wise to make use of the R200's bluetooth abilities and use an external mouse. For the keyboard, it has short but satisfying keystrokes and a rather large keyboard layout.
As for other devices, an external DVD-RW drive is a must and although it retails for $349.99 the Toshiba Slim-Line DVD-RW will make your computing experience all the better.
One surprising feater of the R200 is the Intel mobile 3D display adapter with a 128 Megabtyes of RAM. This little, rugged notebook is actually able to do light gaming - very surprising.
A few draw backs stem from the large volume of pre-installed appications that show up on the R200. AOL, and other pre-installed products make this notbook a little bloated, but 20 minutes of configuration time and I was happy with the trimmed and more efficient loading and boot times.
While the price tag is high (nearly $3500 after 3 year full warranty and add-ons) I am extremely satisfied and I look forward to my R200 being my main road companion for a long time to come.
- 1 reply to this review
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If you're truly concerned about maximum battery life, upgrading to the max 1.25 GB of RAM is a downright horrible idea.
RAM always needs to be powered, whether it is being used or not, and no matter what mode the computer is it. So when you're just typing a reveiew on a webpage, or even when your computer is in sleep mode, you've got an extra 0.75 GB of RAM sucking juice from the battery.
The little time which you gain from having apps load faster or something is going to be far outweighed by the constant power requirements of the extra RAM.
