Toshiba Tecra 9100

10 Apr 2002 00:00

Toshiba's latest Tecra is as nice to look at and use as its predecessor, but we were a little disappointed with this 1.6GHz Mobile Pentium 4 system's performance, and battery life was less than expected. Hopefully production machines (which will have a slightly faster CPU and more RAM) will be quicker.

Externally, the Tecra 9000 and the 9100 appear very similar, if not identical, so you get the well-conceived styling and contrasting silver and black finish that characterised the 9000.

The dimensions and weight are also unchanged, leaving you with a reasonably portable 2.45kg notebook. There's room within the 31 by 26.9cm footprint for a 14.1in. screen running in XGA resolution, and a keyboard that feels reasonably spacious and finger-friendly.

The screen could have been a fraction brighter, but didn't give any other cause for complaint. We suspect that the trademark Toshiba/IBM 'finger-joystick' stud set into the keypad, rather than the keyboard itself, will cause users more problems.

As in the 9000, the lid is made of magnesium alloy to protect the screen during transportation, but unlike the earlier model, the underside of the case itself is not made of metal but plastic. According to Toshiba, the combination of the Mobile Pentium 4 processor and highly conductive magnesium made the machine too hot to sit comfortably on the lap, so it switched back to plastic.

You don't get a floppy drive as standard with this system, but Toshiba sells an external USB drive for about £65 if you need one. The 8-speed DVD-ROM drive is removable and the bay supports hot-swapping of various options ranging from a basic CD-ROM to a combo DVD/CD-RW drive, or alternatives like a second battery or hard disk.

All the drive modules are interchangeable with Toshiba's ultraportable Portégé line, which may help managing resources if you are dealing with large numbers of notebooks -- and you stick to Toshiba across the board, as is clearly the intention. The cross-compatibility is sensibly extended to the port replicator option, which will dock all models in both ranges.

Hidden away inside the case are not one but two wireless adapters, allowing you to use Bluetooth 1.1 or 802.11b (Wi-Fi) connectivity as required. This hardware can be turned off manually from the front panel to save battery power during ordinary usage.

We were curious to see how well the Tecra 9100 fared on battery power, thanks to the various tricks employed by the MP4-M processor's Enhanced SpeedStep functions. The results were less impressive than we had hoped, with BatteryMark 4 reaching the end of the line after 2 hours 11 minutes, which is acceptable, but not exactly a new milestone in endurance.

Performance was also a bit lacklustre, although this was an early review sample and the official specification will use a 1.7GHz rather than a 1.6GHz processor, 256MB of DDR SDRAM rather than 128MB, and a 40GB rather than a 15GB hard disk drive. This will all have a positive effect on overall speed, but as things stand, the Tecra 9100 is only marginally faster than the 1GHz MPIII-M-based Tecra 9000 we tested back in October 2001.

Story URL: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/notebooks/0,1000000333,10000275,00.htm