by Galina Sudareva
06/16/2004 | 12:20 PM
High performance, small dimensions and wireless capabilities are the most valued things today in this rapidly-evolving world of information technologies. Mobile technologies advancing further, we now regard the notebook not as just an electronic typewriter with batteries, but rather as a high-performance system capable of running office and multimedia applications as well as modern 3D games and DVD players (with highest graphics quality settings!).
<%BANNER[article]%>The modern notebook is an amalgam of wireless interfaces and interconnects; it is a stylish, compact and indispensable attribute of the 21st-century man.
The market of portable computers is constantly expanding, revealing variegated models and configurations. The Portege M100 notebook from Toshiba perfectly meets the requirements of the times and the users. We’ll take a closer look at this model today.
These are things you receive with the notebook: an external power adapter (small enough, though), a phone cable, a pack of drivers and utilities, a pile of necessary documentation and a user manual, a spare TrackPoint cap and a gag for an empty optical drive bay.
You don’t have a bag or a mouse here, although they would be of some help.
The Toshiba Portege M100 is a joy for an aesthete’s eye with its slim form, stylish and elegant design, with the silver color of the magnesium-alloy case and the famous logo of Toshiba on the lid. The overall appearance of the model and of its every part follows the same consistent style.
When you open the lid on the top panel, you see a round Power On/Off button, a button for launching Toshiba’s Control Panel and a button for switching to the external monitor, a hole of the integrated microphone and two speakers at the sides (they are made in a curious “bulging” design).
The keyboard is made of opaque black plastic; the Latin letters are white and the functional keys which you press along with the Fn key are light-gray (that’s not very easy to discern) and are placed as a separate row above the main keyboard. A curious feature – the block of PgUp, PgDn, Home and End keys is split up so that the PgUp and PgDn keys are in the right part of the board, while the Home and End keys stand next to the Windows keys in the row of the functional keys. The Insert key is not quite appropriately placed next to the Space bar – you sometimes hit it accidentally. There’s also an integrated numeric pad. Overall, the keyboard is easy to type on and you quickly get used to this layout.
The Portege M100 uses a cursor-controlling device of the TrackPoint type, which replaces the ordinary mouse. It is a small joystick, nestled among keyboard keys and accompanied with four buttons (for serving as the two mouse buttons plus the wheel). I think a touchpad is easier to use than a TrackPoint, but you anyway get accustomed to it in the long run.
The 12.1” screen has a maximum resolution of 1024x768, represents colors satisfactorily, and offers large viewing angles and good brightness. You set up its brightness by using functional keys and the screen shows a symbol like a sun with rays whose sectors are filled depending on the setting you choose. At zero brightness, you practically don’t see anything on the screen, but text becomes visible in full darkness so you may use this mode for midnight reading.
The butt end of the lid is peppered with system status indicators. They are realized as green-highlighted symbols that light up depending on the system’s current function. They include:
The indicator of the Caps Lock mode is implemented in the Caps Lock button itself – the key is highlighted with green light when pressed.
The button for turning on/off the wireless interface is on the front panel, too.
The left side has the following components: volume control, Mic-in socket, headphones socket, infrared port, two PC Card slots (for two Type II cards or one Type III card), network connector, slot for the Kensington lock, and vent holes.
The right panel has a latch for the accumulator battery, a card-reader (Secure Digital) and an optical drive.
The back panel contains an RJ-11 modem port, an RJ-45 network port, a 15-pin monitor port under a cover, an IEEE1394 port and two USB ports.
On the bottom, there are covers for the bays of the hard disk drive, processor, main battery, MiniPCI slot and BIOS battery. There is also replicator port and vent holes here.
The Toshiba Portege M100 is built around an Intel 855GM chipset with an Intel Pentium M 1.2GHz processor (Banias core, 0.13µ technology, 400MHz FSB). It also uses a Toshiba MK4019GAX hard disk drive of 40GB storage capacity and 5400rpm speed.
This model is equipped with two memory slots: one is occupied by a 256MB DDR SO-DIMM module of PC2100, another is free. According to the manufacturer, you can install up to 2048MB of memory into this notebook. The slots are below the keyboard and you have to follow this algorithm to access them: detach the decoration plate (it is close to the screen’s base), unscrew two screws at the right and left that fasten the keyboard, remove the keyboard by pulling it out of its place.
The notebook uses an integrated graphics subsystem with support of Dynamic Video Memory Technology – a portion of the system memory (from 16 to 64MB) is allotted dynamically for the needs of the graphics core. The Portege M100 also features an integrated audio subsystem: a nice quality of sound and loud speakers.
The internal optical DVD/CD-RW drive supports the following speeds: 8x DVD reading, 24x CD reading, 24x CD burning and 24x CD rewriting.
This model is intended for working in “field conditions”, so its Wi-Fi capabilities are a great advantage.
Talking about the cooling system, it is first of all noiseless. We also used an infrared thermometer to measure the temperature on the notebook’s top (34°C) and bottom (37°).
The following table lists all the technical characteristics of the Toshiba Portege M100:
We tested the Toshiba Portege M100 with the preinstalled Microsoft Windows XP Professional OS. Before our tests we disabled energy-saving and networking services, turned off the audio subsystem and the screen-saver.
This notebook comes with the energy consumption settings set up for the maximum performance. In this mode, the notebook doesn’t change the frequency of its functional components when feeding on the battery, which inevitably reduces its battery life. Sometimes, however, you may want your notebook to work long, although with lower performance. In this case, you have two ways of adjusting the power consumption settings:
Then you select a desired setting in Toshiba Power Saver that controls power-saving modes (and offers you the option of creating your own power profiles).
Thus, we have two test modes: with the highest CPU performance (and the shortest battery-life time) and with the lowest CPU performance (and the longest battery-life time). We chose the CPU mode in the BIOS: High and Low settings.
We used the following benchmarking software: tests for checking the system performance in multimedia and office applications (Business Winstone 2004 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004), synthetic tests (SiSoftware Sandra 2004, PCMark 2004), gaming tests (3DMark 2001SE Pro), and battery life tests (Battery Eater Pro 2.2b).
After testing the Portege M100 in synthetic tests, and in the Winstone tests, we realized that we couldn’t expect high performance from it. The manufacturer focused mostly on the long time of autonomous work, rather than on breaking any performance records.
These are the numbers we got in the tests:
When the Portege M100 receives power from its battery, its performance degenerates in three times (by 60-76%). This difference is due to the processor’s frequency reduction from 1.2GHz to 600MHz.
We used 3DMark 2001SE Pro for measuring the system performance in games. There are two test modes. Mode 1: 1024x768 resolution, 16-bit color depth, 16-bit Z-buffer, 16-bit textures. Mode 2: 1024x768 resolution, 32-bit color depth, 24-bit Z-buffer and 32-bit textures.
The results are not very reassuring. The numbers become thrice lower when the notebook starts feeding on its own battery (the minimal performance mode), so you can hardly play 3D games with any comfort when traveling. Well, you wouldn’t have any comfort in modern 3D games even after attaching the Portege M100 to a wall outlet. Alas, the integrated graphics core combined with the reduction of the CPU frequency doesn’t allow this notebook to reach the level of performance necessary for running 3D games.
It did better in tests of the battery life, though. The notebook lasted nearly four hours in the reader’s mode (emulation of the user’s reading onscreen text), and over three hours in the classic mode. The results are also good when you set up the Portege M100 for the maximum performance. This adds more appeal to the device, as its main purpose is clearly to serve in “field conditions”, helping its owners on various business and entertainment trips and so on. The results of the test follow:
The Toshiba Portege M100 leaves a nice impression after the tests. It features a good, thought-out and recognizable design, originally-shaped stereo speakers, excellent ergonomics and functionality, long time of autonomous work. It’s evidently no typewriter, it’s truly a portable computer.
On the other hand, the Portege M100 is not completely blameless. For example, we expected a higher performance from this machine. Also, but this is my personal opinion, a touchpad would be better than the TrackPoint – and there’s enough space where they might have put a touchpad.
Summing it all up, I’d say that the Toshiba Portege M100 is an optimal solution for people who spend much time traveling and working on the run. Maybe that’s you?