WiFi and Hyper-Threading Highlight Toshiba’s Student and Small-Business Laptops

15.0-Inch XGA and 15.4-Inch Widescreen Displays

Whether this fall will take you back to school or simply back to the office, Toshiba wants you to take along an affordable, powerful notebook PC. Four of the company’s six new Satellites feature 15.4-inch widescreen (1,280 by 800) displays and 90-nanometer-process Mobile Pentium 4 CPUs with 533MHz front-side bus, Hyper-Threading Technology, and 1MB of Level 2 cache.

For small businesses, the Satellite A60 and A70 series come with Windows XP Professional as well as Microsoft OneNote and Works. The A60-S156 ($1,099 with an Intel Celeron/2.8) and A60-S166 ($1,249 with a 2.8GHz Mobile Pentium 4 518) have 15.0-inch XGA screens, 40GB hard disks, 256MB of memory, and ATI’s Mobility Radeon 7000 IGP graphics. The Satellite A70-S256 ($1,499) has a 3.06GHz Mobile Pentium 4 532, the wide LCD with ATI’s Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP, 512MB of memory, and a 60GB hard disk. All three have DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drives and integrated 802.11b/g wireless networking.

For students and consumers, three Satellite A75 laptops share the 15.4-inch widescreen display, Mobility Radeon 9000 IGP, 512MB of DDR333 memory, and Windows XP Home Edition with the Napster downloading service and Toshiba’s ConfigFree software that automatically finds the nearest hotspot or WLAN for the integrated 802.11b/g adapter. The A75-S206 ($1,399) has the 2.8GHz Mobile Pentium 4 518; the A75-S226 ($1,599) has the 3.06GHz model 532; and the A75-S276 ($1,749) has the 3.2GHz model 538, as well as an 80GB hard disk to its siblings’ 60GB. The top two of the trio have DVD±RW drives instead of DVD-ROM/CD-RW.