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Toshiba Tecra M3 Hands-on Review
The Toshiba Tecrea M3 still continues to be the non-plus ultra robust office laptop, with many innovative ideas and comfort features. However the noisy fan makes everyday use distracted.
Jan 2006
Introduction
I used to define the Toshiba Tecra as the 'Toyota Corolla' for laptops. It's a machine that is no fancy, no exciting, but of super quality. The computer that does no more than when I switch it on, it powers up and continues to do so every day for the next three years. Therefore the resale value of Toshiba Tecras is very high and I would buy any second hand Toshiba Tecra 8200 without hesitation.
This is a laptop to expect a lot from, and though Toshiba didn't pay enough attention to the cooling fan of the CPU, which prevents me using it for more than 30 minutes, let's delve into the details of my three day experience, as the Tecra M3 is really an exciting peace of technology.
Contents
Specifications
When working in corporate office environment, the choice was very limited to get a thin and light laptop with all the features I need, especially the parallel port and the TV-Out.
Of course, it's all about USB now, and at home, I upgraded all my equipment to USB, however, in the office there are still many printers in use with parallel port and the TV-out was a must to put images on the big TV screen of our meeting room. We still prefer the big size TV for meetings, because we had the TV from before and the projector would require a flat white are for the image, has fan noise and cannot run all day long without pause.
With all these options in mind, the round-up finished only with 3 possible choices for the laptop project, with the Tecra M3 on the top.
Detailed specs:
We purchased the Tecra M3 through toshibadirect.com, competitive price and wide range of configuration options. We went for the smallest CPU option possible to save on heat-up and price, as anything above a PIII 750 MHz deals with my MS Office tasks wonderfully. We also choose the 1024x768 resolution screen, as we experienced higher resolutions hard to read with the small letters. The SuperMulti DVD drive was a wonderful option, finally a laptop that can deal with DVD-RAM disks, my first choice for backups. Because the fancy warranty options only for the US, I went for the free basic warraty.
Case
The magnesium case feels extremely robust. This is really a notebook that can lag around in laptop bags, lift up and down in backpacks, travel in the air, drive power point presentations, get typed thousands of e-mails on the keyboard. In short, the Tecra M3 fulfils my number one requirement for computers - robust operation. The main advantage of the Tecra M3 is its sub 2kg weight - feels comfortable to carry all day long.
Toshiba Tecra M3 closed and open
Toshiba Tecra M3 - bottom
Connectivity
This is finally a laptop which has all the necessary ports. For desktops, it's easy to plan connectivity options and it's also easy to change them, however, laptops should work in environments I don't forsee and the only way to improve on ports is via PCMCIA cards. Before, I had to use a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card with my PIII sub-notebook - quite uncomfortable: bulk, can ruin hibernation, extra piece to carry, etc.
The Tecra M3 has almost all the possible connectivity options that I can think of for an office use: parallel (for printers), VGA (projectors), USB, Firewire, PCMCIA, ExpressCard, SD, Ethernet, modem, S-Video out, mic-in, phone-out. I miss though a universal card reader slot (CF, MS, xDcard) and more USB 2.0 ports, the two fills up very fast with my mouse and external hard drive.
Though vga is still the deafult connector for projectors, I'd welcome a DVI connector, as I use the laptop in a two screen setup both in the office and home, and both of my desktop TFTs can take advantage of DVI.
As for port placement, I usually have to choose between hot air and bothering pendrives - I prefer the latter and this is the case with the Tecra M3.
Left side: parallel port - cpu fan - security cable hole - ExpressCard/PCMCIA/SD card
Front: activity leds - WiFi on/off button - Volume dial
Right side: phone-out - mic-in - USB 2.0 x 2 - DVD drive - VGA-out
Back - S-video-out - modem - LAN 10/100 - AC-power
Storage
This model had 80GB of HDD space, which is enough for my laptop needs. The optical drive included was a super-multi drive. It means that it reads-writes DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW, and DVD-RAM. The latter is very handy to make backups of my important files, I just slot it in, drag'n'drop the files onto the disk in Windows Explorer and ready. The reliability of the DVD-Ram disks is among the highest compared to other optical media.
It is possible to swap the optical drive with a hard-drive bay or a second battery.
Performance
Under office applications, Internet, light photo editing, DVD playback, music playback, the Tecra M3 was very responsive and this is no surprise, because the Centrino 1.73 GHz cpu with 2 MB L2 cache is super fast. Hard drive intensive tasks (opening applications, zip/unzip, moving files) were not as fast as on the latest desktop hard drives, but were still faster compared to my 3 year old IBM 60GB desktop hdd. The 512 MB RAM was more than enough to open all the Explorer windows, Word documents, Outlook, mp3 playback and such, all at the same time. For gaming, the cut back NVidia 6200 vga chip (originally 6600) is a modest competitor, will run last years games without problems in 800 x 600. The vga chip with its dedicated memory is a serious advantage compared to other thin-and-light laptops with integrated chipset vga running on shared system memory.
Battery life
Despite the modest performance, battery life was not in my desirable 8-9 hour range - a full day of work away from the wall outlet without even thinking about power requirements, like with my mobile phone or PDA. Anything below that means I have to carry my AC adapter and will have to recharge. Otherwise, my requirement is 2.5 hours on battery with full brightness and CPU power, which is watching a DVD movie using the optical drive or sit in a long office meeting.
Unfortunately, the power adapter is still of the black-brick type. I'd welcome some neat power adapters, like those from Apple. It really would make a difference for me, I have to pack it in and out several times a day.
Toshiba Tecra M3 AC adapter
Built-in hardware managers
This is where Toshiba always excelled and what can make laptop use a joy or a disaster. The small utilities to change brightness, mute, power profiles are easy to operate and are very responsive.
Under power options, it is possible to set up brightness, CPU speed, screen saver, standby etc. for all the power profiles.
Toshiba Tecra M3 power options setup
There is a very handy application for WiFi, which let's you choose a hotspot from a map. The network manager utility takes care of all WiFi, Bluetooth, dial-up, ethernet lan and firewire lan. However, Netsh is still the best choice to switch between profiles for the ethernet lan. (See articles on netsh here and here.)
Toshiba hot spot seeker - click on image for full size
Add-on applications
I liked that Toshiba didn't make a Christmas tree of its products. But this time I had to spend half an hour the get rid of all the annoying AOL 30 day trials, etc. I also had a look on the included DVD burner and DVD player applications, but changed them to Ahead Nero and WinDVD 7 in no time.
Design
Looks of the Tecra M3 are OK to me, I still prefer 'gray' style for working. If you are more into the Apple or the Sony Vaio design lines, you won't be happy with the Tecra M3. It's just a black-silver box, with all the buttons/leds at the right place, but not an extra curvy line or design element to please the eyes.
Heat
Heat can always be an issue in the case of laptops and up to now, all my notebooks became hot during use. The Toshiba Tecra M3 is no exception, the Intel Centrino 1.7 GHz CPU generates a lot of heat. Even in battery mode, if I have with the Tecra in my lap, my legs get a pain because of the hot bottom of the laptop after 20-30 minutes of use (like watch a DVD on the train).
Screen
The dimensions of the Tecra M3 are just the right for me. I had problems with sub-notebooks, like adjusting to the small keyboard or eyes getting tired with the small 12" screen, but here both keyboard and screen are of the right size.
Viewing angle is wide, which can be either an advantage or disadvantage. For my desktop TFT, I like wide viewing angles, so even 2-3 of us can watch a movie. However, for my laptop, I want narrow viewing angles, so people don't see the e-mail I type in the train or in the rows of packed conference halls.
Sound
Speakers finally make enough sound to watch a movie without headphones. I mean watch, not enjoy, as sound quality is far from average desktop speakers. However, I could have a chat in Skype without problems (there is a built-in application to filter echoing due to the mic picking up its own sound from the speakers).
Operational noise of the Tecra M3 is its major low area. With the default power options, the fan was always on, and after 30 minutes of use, I just go tired of its noise. Then I changed the power settings and lowered the CPU speed to minimum (lower speed - less heat - less fan), then I had 10 min silence altered with 10 min lower-noise. People around me were also disturbed by the fan noise, on business meetings I wouldn't tolerate such a loud machine on the table. This makes me remember me to the Toshiba Tecra 8100, which had the same issues some years back, then it was corrected in the Tecra 8200, which was a joy to use then.
Keyboard
Unfortunately, the keyboard layout followed again the usual Toshiba way: Win and Right click keys are in the top left corner and Ins and Del are in the bottom row near Space. Both locations are out of the usual areas therefore Win+ shortcuts are not as automatic as on standard keyboards and I make many errors when reaching for the Ins and Del keys. The top row of the small F1-F12 keys is also a non-standard, I always have to look to press the right F key. (See article on laptop keyboards here.)
Otherwise, typing feels very good, the keyboard is of good quality. It is no question, this keyboard will function as new even after years. My previous notebook, the Toshiba Portégé 2000 had the same keyboard technology, which I loved even after 3 years of use. Key travel is short and fells hard, but it makes me type very-very fast and precise. I prefer this over the keyboard of my IBM ThinkPad X20.
Toshiba Tecra M3 keyboard
Touchpad and AccuPoint
There is both a touchpad and accupoint, you can use both for pointing or to set up one of them from scrolling or other features.
The touchpad is smaller than I'd like and is packed with many software features that rather complicates my life then eases it (scroll, program launch, browser navigation, etc.). So I rushed to turn them all off, except the scroll function. The physical position of the pad is a bit to the left, so working with the right hand on the touch pad feels more comfortable.
The accupoint is very handy when I type fast and don't want to move my hand from the keyboard, like position the cursor a few words backwards. Operation is OK, mouse buttons for the accupoint are in a comfortable position.
However, I still prefer to use a real mouse with a scroll button, so I just carry my MS Optical Mouse USB blue
with me and plug-it right after opening up the lid. This mouse is a bit smaller than the average desktop mouse, but still has a comfortable size compared to the small finger-mice made for laptop use. So, despite the excellent quality of the touchpad and the accupoint, they cannot beat my simple optical mouse in productivity and comfort.
I didn't like (-)
The Toshiba Tecra M3 is a reliable business notebook meant to run under heavy office use - it does it superbly. Nice screen, quality keyboard, light-weight and wide range of configuration options, all put it above the competition. However, the non-standard keyboard layout and the noisy fan made me to abandon using it and stops me to recommend. If Toshiba improves on the fan for the next generation, the Tecra M3 will be again on the top of my list.
Acknowledgements: I am thankful to my lot travelling colleague Juan Carlos Barrado for the possibility of the 3 days hands-on.
Last edited on 29-Jan-2006.
(c) Imre Oliver Kozak and @Foxpop.
