Toshiba Laptop--M505-S4940

I have to admit, laptops scare me a little. I feel as if being so small, their ability to process everything that I need them to process at once (nothing too fancy, just all the Explorer tabs I have open at once while checking my online banking, Latina.com Facebook, work email, personal email, and maybe a bit of online shopping), will make them slow to a snail’s pace and frustrate me to no end.

That’s why when I started road testing this Toshiba notebook, I was beyond pleasantly surprised—this machine could handle it! The first thing that I noticed was of course the super cool design on the top cover and inside; it’s definitely a notebook with personality. The pricetag is incredibly fair for such a machine, especially considering the techie aspects of it: it’s super fast (the Intel Pentium dual core mobile processor T4200 makes it speedy); 4GB of RAM, so you can have as many programs as you want open; and the hard drive is 320 GB, lots of space for a small machine—enough to store plenty of my music (salsitas to my rock en español!) and my pictures. There are two USB ports, along with plenty of other ports for many different peripherals, like a slot for media cards.

The laptop itself is also really light and portable—weighing in at just a little more than 5 lbs. and only 1.5 inches thick—which I loved. Another great value for the money: this model comes with Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007, which includes Word, PowerPoint, Excel and One Note (a program that helps you gather notes and information) and 15 months of Norton Anti-Virus. I like that—and these days any little bit of help to my wallet helps! Yuliana Gomez

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