Welcome to a Laptop Battery specialist of the Toshiba Laptop Battery
Toshiba’s shiny M305 notebook with battery like Toshiba PA5157U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba M40-A Battery, Toshiba M50-AT02S1 Battery, Toshiba Satellite E55 Battery, Toshiba M50-A Battery, Toshiba Satellite M50T Battery, Toshiba Satellite U940 Battery, Toshiba Satellite U50T Battery, Toshiba PA5208U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba Chromebook CB35 Battery, Toshiba Satellite E45W Battery, Toshiba Satellite P55W Battery packs a lot of performance and features into an extremely elegant and sophisticated-looking chassis. Despite its relatively low price it offers 3GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive and a Core 2 Duo “Penryn” processor in a light and portable package. Though it won’t win any benchmark shootouts it’s certainly adequate for web surfing and office productivity; the only downside is it includes the usual Toshiba bloatware, so know that you’ll have to spend some time cleaning it up a bit to allow it to reach its full potential.
Toshiba offers three similar configurations of the M305 on its website, but you can also customize your model quite a bit if you are so inclined. The model we received is the M305-S4826, which is uses an Intel Santa Rosa chipset with a Penryn Core 2 Duo processor clocked at 2.1GHz with 3MB of L2 cache (the higher end Penryns have 6MB). It uses an 800MHz front side bus with 3GB of DDR2 RAM, which is more than enough to run its OS – Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1.
A notebook’s display size is a key factor in considering a notebook, as anything less than 15” is usually “portable” and anything bigger will usually stay plugged in most of the time. The M305 sports the popular 14.1” display, which is small enough to reduce the chassis size, but big enough to not feel cramped. It has a widescreen aspect ratio too, which is good for movie-watching. It’s a WXGA panel with a native resolution of 1280×800, and used Toshiba’s TruBrite technology, which is what the company calls its glossy screen coating.
The included webcam and microphone gave us a few problems during testing. We liked that the webcam could capture video at 1280×800, and recording video is very easy. Just start the camera and click the video box to record, but we were unable to get it to record audio no matter what we did. All of our videos were silent, and the “record audio” button was useless. We went into the preferences and it has an “audio volume” meter, and when we spoke it registered, but we couldn’t get it to work regardless. Strangely enough, the M305 includes Toshiba’s Speech System, which lets you bark out commands and have the PC do your bidding. We had no problems with this software and it works great. You can say “Open Internet Explorer” and the program opens a few seconds later. Why the microphone works for this feature but not the webcam is unknown.
Toshiba also includes a facial recognition feature that can use your face to log onto the computer, but it’s way too difficult to calibrate. In order for it to recognize your face you have to hold your face inside a transparent “face ouline” that has two eyes, a nose and a mouth. You have to align your parts with the frame’s parts, then follow it back and forth and up and down for about 30 seconds. We tried this exercise three times and every time it failed, which is ridiculous. It should be more like the Asus U6S, which simply zooms in on your face and takes a picture.
We performed our DVD run-down test on the M305, and it lasted for a respectable 2 hours and 3 minutes, which is enough to catch a movie on a plane. You can buy a bigger 9-cell battery from Toshiba for just $129, and together they’d probably offer around 5 hours of battery life, which is great for frequent travelers.
The M305 certainly has a lot to offer folks who are looking for a semi-portable notebook. At just 5.2 lbs. it’s relatively light, small and would easily slip into a backpack. We love the elegant design and white lights that accent the black and grey colors – it’s a very attractive notebook, and clearly the company’s paying more attention to style as indicated by the M305 and the Qosmio. There were several small things that bothered us such as the webcam and facial recognition software, but the biggest gripe we have is with the bloatware. We really wish Toshiba would at least give customers the option to have it removed or just put it all on a CD that the user could browse at he or she’s leisure instead of mucking up the desktop with links to trialware.