For the past week I’ve had in my possession a Toshiba Tecra A8 Notebook which I have thanks to Talk Toshiba and it’s Tecra A8 triallist programme in which they give bloggers, journalists and community leaders the chance to test out their laptops for a week (more if you request) in exchange for writing an honest, objective review on your blog, forum and community site etc.

So as my week of tetsing the laptop is now coming to an end, I thought I’d better give you my review of it.

First of all the hardware specifications for the Toshiba Tecra A8 Notebook are as follows (this was gatherd using SiSoft Sandra):

Not only did I test laptop by using automatic testing software such as SiSoft Sandra, PCMark06 and 3DMark06 but I also took the laptop out on the streets to get a better feel what it was like to use on the open road, as that’s the whole idea of laptops, portability so you can take it out with you.

Here’s what I think some of the Pros and Cons are of the laptop:

The Pros (The Good)

The overall look and feel

• The overall look and feel of the laptop is pretty good; it has a simple yet smart appearance with no sharp corners on the edges.
• The Size of it is pretty decent too, with a nice screen size of 15.4″.
• The weight of the laptop is relatively light, and I had no problems carrying it around in a laptop bag for some of the day while testing it out on the streets.
• The power is also pretty good; you can get a little more than 3 hours battery life out of it, especially if you use TOSIBA’s Power Saver Application.
• It’s also worth noting that it’s also nice and quite

Hardware specifications

• The Hardware Specifications are great for what the laptop is, and is has just about the right amount of external connection ports, however I would have liked to see some USB Ports to the side of the laptop so every time I wanted to plug in a USB Stick I didn’t have to reach round the back.
• I found the onboard WiFi to work great while testing it at the University of Kent Canterbury Campus and at home.

The Cons (The Bad)

Keyboard Layout

• I think the keyboard layout positioning was one of the things that bugged me most about the Toshiba Tecra A8 because the keys where a little cramped due to the fact that to the left of all the keys was a small vertical black strip section which was reserved  for 3 buttons (power button, Toshiba Assistant Launcher, Resolution changer) so when placing your hands on the laptop straight away without thinking you would find that where you thought Q was, was in fact the TAB key and where you thought caps was, was in fact the Caps Lock Button.
• Eventually I got a little better to remembering where the keys where but after spending a long time on a normal keyboard and coming back to the laptop keyboard it took a little time once again to get adjusted with the key positioning. I believe this problem could have been solve by either placing theses function buttons somewhere else like above the keyboard or by possible making the black colour strip a different colour.

Operating System

• Though Windows XP is still a good operating system, it’s now 6 years old. I believe the laptop would have looked more up to date if Windows Vista was installed.

Conclusion

Other than the keyboard layout problem and the fact that I would have preferred Windows Vista to be preinstalled instead of Windows XP, I think the Toshiba Tecra A8 Notebook is a pretty good laptop for personal/work use, especially as it as a nice screen size and is quite lightweight. If of course Windows Vista was going to be preinstalled some more RAM than the current 1GB wouldn’t go a miss though.