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Toshiba Portege S100 Review
The Hollywood Diet
Eric Grevstad

Toshiba 's Portege brand helped pioneer the executive status symbol known as the slimline notebook -- a thin, stylish laptop that trims weight by packing only an internal hard disk, with no floppy or optical drive apart from a desktop docking station or plug-in external accessories. The 12.1-inch-screened, under-3-pound Portege R100/R200 continues that tradition today.

But sometimes, even an exec traveling light prefers to travel with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive -- to watch movies on the plane or burn backup discs at the hotel -- or craves a larger, higher-resolution LCD. So Toshiba has tweaked its recipe with the Portege S100 ($2,099 for the S100-S213TD model tested here, with a rebate cutting it to $1,999 through August 31).

The S100 offers a 14.1-inch-diagonal, 1,400 by 1,050-pixel display in what notebook geeks call a two-spindle design -- a 60GB internal hard disk plus DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo, the latter swappable for a DVD burner ($370) or 80GB second hard drive ($420). Its keyboard boasts full desktop-size spacing or pitch (19mm key to key). Intel's Pentium M 760 (2.0GHz) processor, Nvidia's GeForce Go 6200 TE graphics controller, and 512MB of DDR-2/533 memory provide ample performance.

And it measures a trim 10.5 by 12.5 by 0.9 inches and weighs 4.5 pounds -- as we took it out of the box, it felt so light we figured it shipped, like many notebooks, without the battery pack installed. We were wrong.

The Toshiba's AC adapter adds one pound to your briefcase. If the S213TD setup isn't light enough for your wallet, an S113TD model is $500 less with a slightly slower Pentium M 740 chip and smaller 256MB of memory and 40GB hard drive.

Reference: http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/reviews/5930/1/

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