Review: Toshiba Satellite L675D-S7106 Laptop

Jon L. Jacobi says this full-size laptop is light for its size and its 17.3-inch screen makes for easy viewing, but poor battery life and mediocre perromance bring it down.

"If you were to go hands-on with the $700 (as of March 30, 2011) Toshiba Satellite L675D-S7106 before you looked at its test scores, you'd never guess that it was one of the slower desktop replacement laptops we've tried. Subjectively, its performance is agile in standard desktop applications, and its large, 17.3-inch, 1600-by-900-pixel display gives you plenty of screen real estate. The machine even has a Blu-ray drive on board, so you can watch high-def moves. For the price, it's a lot of laptop.

The L670 series is available with a ridiculous number of CPU options--everything from an Intel Pentium or AMD Turion II to an Intel Core i3 to the AMD Phenom II P860 Triple-Core on the L675D-S7106. Joining the Phenom on our test configuration were an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 graphics processor, 4GB of memory, a 5400-rpm 500GB hard drive, and the aforementioned Blu-ray player/DVD burner. Just looking at the branding, you might think that it had a discrete graphics card, but you'd be wrong: The HD 4250 is a two-generations-old Radeon graphics offering built into the chipset, sharing RAM with the main system."