Toshiba's Feature-Packed Portege 4000

To satisfy frequent business travelers who want a thin and light notebook without a sacrifice in power, computer manufacturers built sleek ultraportables with robust performance--but at the expense of built-in ports and optical drives. "We want to have those, too," the mobile elite chanted. And Toshiba, among others, has obligingly answered the call with its redesign of the Portégé line.

At 4.75 pounds without AC adapter, the Portégé 4000 gains about 0.5 inch and 1.5 pounds more than its predecessor, the 3490CT. My $2579 preproduction unit included a built-in 8X DVD and 4X/4X/24X CD-RW combination drive, on-board ethernet and 802.11b wireless ports, a Secure Digital media slot, two PC Card slots, a 56-kbps modem, and Windows 2000.

This notebook sports a 750/600-MHz Pentium III SpeedStep processor, a crisp 12-inch TFT screen with 1024 by 768 maximum resolution, 256MB of RAM, and a 30GB hard drive. Battery life on the preproduction unit I tested was about 2.5 hours--and that was with the DVD drive playing for about 2 hours. This laptop has a sleek case housing a nearly full-size keyboard with well-placed keys, a touchstick pointing device, and stereo speakers that deliver better sound quality than you get on most notebooks.

One drawback is that the indicator lights (for battery, hard disk, and so on) are positioned at the top of the screen lid, where they can't be seen when the PC is in use. But that's a minor quibble for a powerful system housed in such an easy-to-carry chassis.

SUMMARY

Toshiba Portégé 4000 Its David dimensions belie Goliath power and functionality, making this ultraportable every bit as useful as a notebook of more conventional size. List: $2579