Toshiba Tecra A11 Notebook: Business-Class Muscle

Often, when targeting business professionals, laptop PC makers seem to focus so much on getting their products perceived as reliable or cost-effective that performance seems to become a secondary consideration. But the best business–class systems strike just the right balance, offering both solid performance and peace of mind. And with the Tecra A11, Toshiba is looking to show us that they've got that balance down to a T.

The Tecra A11 is a desktop replacement that's a little more portable than many of the breed, thanks to a 15.6- instead of 17-inch or larger screen -- but a high-resolution screen, rest assured, at 1,440 by 900 with native 720p HD support. Weighing in at as little as 5.6 pounds depending on configuration options, it measures 9.9 by 14.7 by 1.5 inches. So it's not the slimmest 15-inch-class laptop you're going to come across, but it's not the bulkiest, either.

And at a price of $1,349 for the top-of-the-line Tecra A11-S3540 model tested, Toshiba certainly packs a lot into the package. That starts with the Intel Core i7-620M, a 2.66GHz dual-core CPU that is paired with the Intel Mobile QM57 Express chipset, has 4MB of Smart Cache, accelerates to 3.33GHz for single-threaded workloads thanks to Turbo Boost Technology, and pretends to be a quad-core for multithreaded workloads thanks to Hyper-Threading.

The S3540 also comes configured with 4GB of DDR3-1066 memory (upgradable to 8GB, though you'll have to replace the included DIMMs to max out the memory). As far as storage goes, our Tecra came with a 7,200-rpm 320GB SATA hard drive that skimped neither on space nor performance. The included optical drive is a DVD SuperMulti drive that supports any format you can think of short of Blu-ray.

The Toshiba Tecra A11

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