Laptops still to conquer the gaming peak

GIZMO GALLERY

Toshiba's new machines don't work too well playing games, and on battery, the problem intensifies.

Why do you want to pay upwards of Rs 40,000 for a laptop, which is pretty much the cost of a bare-basic machine nowadays? For reduced weight, superior performance, including perhaps the audio and video performance, right?

Toshiba's just come out with two models, the M70 and the A80, in its Satellite series, and while they score decently in terms of both weight and looks, they don't do so well when it comes to gaming, which is where a computer's true processing capacity comes into play.

At nearly three kilos, and 360 x 263 x 38.5 mm, the M70 is undoubtedly on the beefy side, but it sort of makes up for this with its 1.73 GHz Pentium M processor, 60 GB of storage space coupled with 512MB of RAM and built-in 802.11 wireless and ethernet LAN. (If you're looking for something cuter, your best bet is to look at the Sony Vaio S-series VGN-S460P since this weighs only 2 kilograms, is 35 mm thick and comes with NVIDIA GeForce Go 6200 graphics adapter, 13.3-inch WXGA screen and the ability to upgrade to 2GB of RAM, from the standard 512 MB.)

Both M70 and the A80 both score low points when it comes to playing 3D games primarily because of their inability to process applications faster.

Sporting a large 15.4-inch XGA display, M70 offers automatic switching between UMTS-based 3G networks and other network connections such as LAN and Wi-Fi, although the notebook does not integrate 3G connectivity.

The battery ran for a little over three hours before it gave up and I had to connect it to power source. Windows XP Professional Edition comes bundled with the Satellite cousins.

In fact, both M70 and A80 have integrated Harman Kardon stereo speakers with SRS WOW XT and SRS TruSurround XT, which is a great idea since the voice quality is excellent. At Rs 62,990, it's worth it.

Though the Satellite A80 boasts of a glossy finish display screen or what Toshiba calls TruBrite, it has an XGA resolution, this works well only if you're sitting at the right angle "" move a bit, and you get to see what could be called dark patch syndrome.

Packed with Intel Centrino Pentium M 730, and a processor that runs at 1.6GHz, the A80 is prescribed for a basic office user with a few games like Freecell or Solitaire sessions managed in between.

The laptop's fan is a bit noisier than it should be "" this happens while you press the keys situated near the fan "" and this could be embarassing while making a presentation in a room full of attentive people.

The keyboard is almost identical in shape and size in both the Satellite notebooks, and is comfortable. The corners of the touchpad have hidden features such as scrolling, and I found this annoying as I kept pressing the corner when moving over the touchpad.

Both LG's M1 Express Dual notebooks and the Toshiba A80 sport the NVIDIA GeForce Go 7 Series "" the latest graphics card and the TurboCache technology.

The differences crept in when you played the games. What I liked the most in LG's M1 Express was the hot swap module bay feature that enables exchange between hard drives, combo drives and DVD-Dual drives even when the notebook is up and running.

The Satellite A80 laptop ran exactly 3 hours on battery life when running on full CPU power, GPU (general processing unit) power with some hot games such as Call of Duty.

I noticed that when the power left falls to around 25 per cent, the laptop switches to a lower processor setting profile by default to conserve battery power, and this is where it hampers the your game.

LG's dual-core processors allows users to run multiple high-performance applications and this includes open office applications too.

The P1 Express Dual and M1 Express Dual sport enhanced graphics and support for greater security options like fingerprint recognition system.

Featuring Intel's core duo processors, the machine is powered by the latest Pentium M processor and a DDR2 667MHz dual channel memory.

This simply means that M1 Express Dual notebooks are hot when it comes to supporting any multimedia applications, from music and movies, to design work and games. M1 Express is not-so-heavy at 2.8 kilograms but at 15 inches, the screen size is slightly smaller than the M70.

Any notebook can run for 5 hours on battery power when just using it for office application such as email, Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint. But those are not the only applications that one uses.

Till such time that the laptop industry figures out a solution to this, apart from the gaming problem, most multi-tasking applications will continue to be executed the fastest on desktops