If you’re not sure what will sell, try asking your customers. (What a novel idea!) That’s what Best Buy did, and it resulted with the superb Toshiba Satellite E305-S1990X, a top-notch, low-price notebook chock-full of features and performance without the extras that can sometimes weigh a notebook down.



Best Buy calls such customer-guided systems "Blue Label" laptops, and they're made with features that Best Buy's clientele specifically asked for. Toshiba collaborated with Best Buy on this model and built this machine with that guidance in mind. Best Buy will sell this system for $899. (Alternately, if you have money burning a hole in your pocket, you can get the same model directly from Toshiba for $1,089.) With excellent performance, above-average battery life, a durable chassis, and a slick-looking design, the Satellite E305 is one of the best thin-and-light laptops on the market.

Design From the first glance, the Toshiba Satellite E305 looks like a winner. It features a sharp-looking aluminum chassis with a slight pale-green tint to it. (No, the images here aren't off-hue.) The exterior feels solid, obscures fingerprints, and could work for a business user or general consumer. The machine weighs 4.9 pounds, which is lighter than Toshiba's comparably equipped 5.4-pound Satellite M645-S4118X, and it measures 1.25x13.5x9.1 inches. It's light and sturdy enough for frequent travel, though we'd still recommend a smaller ultraportable (by definition, an under-4-pound machine) for truly constant travelers.

The Satellite E305 has a better-than-usual array of ports for a thin-and-light laptop. You get USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports (one of each), an eSATA/USB 2.0 combo port with Sleep and Charge (which lets you recharge USB devices while the laptop is off or napping), an Ethernet port, a VGA-out connector, a microphone jack, a headphone jack, and a Kensington lock slot. Additionally, a Blu-ray reader/DVD writer, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi connectivity, 4G WiMAX support, and Bluetooth connectivity come standard. And under the front lip is a flash-card reader that works with the SD, MultiMediaCard, Memory Stick (MS), and MS Pro formats.





The aluminum finish on the outside of the E305 obscures fingerprints and feels sturdy in the hand.



Also onboard is a 500GB "hybrid" drive that decreases boot time. (The drive is a standard platter-based hard drive, augmented by some speedy flash memory for caching and faster performance.) According to Toshiba, it should be 50 percent faster. We didn't see anything that dramatic, but bootup was fairly fast; we clocked the machine at a 34-second boot time. By contrast, the Asus U31JG-A1—which has a 500GB 5,400rpm hard drive, 4GB of RAM, and a Next-Gen (a.k.a. "Sandy Bridge") Intel Core i3 processor—booted in 50 seconds. Unfortunately, all these powerful components make the e305 run a little loud, with the internal cooling fan getting noisy during Blu-ray viewing or other resource-intensive tasks.

Features The Satellite E305's VGA (0.3-megapixel) Webcam is embedded in the bezel, right above the screen. When it's enabled, a blue light glows next to the sensor. Images were average as far as VGA Webcams go; stills and video shot under low-light conditions did not convey color and detail well, but still shots taken under better lighting came out with decent exposure.



The keyboard on the E305 looks sharp and performs well. It's a black-plastic Chiclet-style keyboard with white LED backlighting. Typing was smooth and accurate, and the top row of keys features full media controls, including volume and brightness. Above the keys, on the top right, is a two-button control that toggles the Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) feature, which lets you transmit audio and video from your monitor to a compatible HDTV screen, and Toshiba's Eco Mode, which helps conserve power and save battery life. Note, though, that to make the WiDi work, you'll need to use Netgear's Push2TV adapter on the HDTV end, which is included in the $899 price or sold separately for $99.99.









The Satellite E305's Chiclet-style keyboard is comfortable and has white LED backlighting.



Surrounded by a glossy black bezel, the 14-inch TruBrite display features a 1,366x768 native resolution. The bright screen provided detailed images and videos. To test its HD-playback quality, we watched some of 2009's Star Trek on Blu-ray, as well as the Star Trek trailer streaming from YouTube. In both cases, the movie looked crisp, and color replication was excellent.



The speakers, which sit under the front lip, can get moderately loud and fill a small room. Unfortunately, sound is flat, and audio detail doesn't come through. For example, the song “Judas” by Lady Gaga has all sorts of strange computer-made noises and loud bass, and the E305's speakers handled it barely passably. The speakers had only moderate treble and couldn't convey any of the song's quieter tones.







The E305 has a microphone jack, a headphone jack, one USB 3.0 port, and HDMI and VGA-connectors on its right side.



One quirk with the E305's sound was that even at full volume, the sound on a Blu-ray movie was barely audible. We used the default Corel WinDVD BD program, but no settings would make the movie louder. Whether it's for movies or music, headphones are your best bet for decent sound quality.

Performance The Satellite E305 offers particularly good performance for its $899 price. The machine has a powerful 2011-model Intel CPU (specifically, the 2.3GHz Core i5-2410M), along with 4GB of RAM. Rather than a separate graphics chipset, it relies on the Mobile Intel HD Graphics circuitry that comes integrated into that Sandy Bridge processor.

On the 64-bit version of PCMark Vantage, which measures overall system performance, the Satellite E305 scored a very good 7,511. That's considerably better than the same-priced Samsung QX410's 6,108 (which was running on a previous-generation Core i5 processor) or the Toshiba Satellite M645's 6,233 (which also ran on a previous-generation Core i5 CPU). We suspect that the pairing of the faster hard drive with a Next-Gen Core i5 processor really helped boost the E305's numbers.



The Satellite E305's knack for application performance also showed on the 64-bit Cinebench 10 benchmark test, which is a CPU workout that exercises all cores. The E305's score of 9,651 topped the Samsung QX410's 8,066, and it came in barely lower than the Satellite M645's 9,721. This is an excellent score, over 2,000 points above average and demonstrates very strong multitasking abilities.



And the Satellite E305 delivered phenomenal results for a laptop in our media-file-conversion tests. For example, in our Windows Media Encoder test, in which we convert a 3-minute-and-15-second video clip to a DVD-quality format, the E305 finished the job in 3 minutes and 31 seconds, the fastest result we've seen on a thin-and-light laptop. In comparison, the QX410 took 4:01 on this test task, while the M645 had a nearly identical result (3:32). We also saw super-speedy results on our iTunes Conversion Test, which entails converting 11 test-standard MP3 tracks to AAC format. The E305 completed this task in 2 minutes and 35 seconds, which was faster than QX410's 3:37 and the Satellite M645's 2:36.







On the left side, the Satellite E305 has a power port, Ethernet jack, USB 2.0 port, a USB 2.0/eSATA port with Sleep and Charge, and a Blu-ray drive.



To evaluate the capabilities of the Satellite E305's graphics (which, as we mentioned, are built into the processor), we ran our 3DMark06 test. On this test, the E305 delivered above-average scores of 4,963 (at 1,024x768 resolution) and 4,385 (at its native resolution, 1,366x768). The Samsung QX410 was a fair bit behind, with a 4,188 at 1,024x768 and a 3,679 at native. However, the Toshiba M645, thanks to its dedicated graphics processor, blew away both machines on this test (7,361 and 6,654 at these resolutions, respectively).

With its six-cell battery, the E305 performed well above the 3-hour-and-30-minute average we've seen among thin-and-light laptops. On our harsh DVD battery-rundown test, in which we loop a DVD of the movie The Matrix (with the screen set to 50 percent brightness) until the battery dies, the E305 endured for an excellent 4:17. The Samsung QX410 performed slightly better (4:28), while the Satellite M645 faltered a bit and ran for 3:51.

Conclusion Finally, what sets this notebook apart from a standard Toshiba laptop purchase is an unusually good array of preinstalled software and a better-than-average warranty. Usually, Toshiba includes a standard one-year warranty on parts, labor, and battery, but this notebook comes with a two-year warranty on those items.

For software, you get one year of Norton Antivirus and three years of Intel PC Theft Defense; the latter allows you to lock down your data remotely if your laptop is ever lost or stolen. We also appreciate that Google’s Chrome browser is preinstalled, sitting in the Windows 7 taskbar alongside Internet Explorer 8. You also get an ad-supported version of Microsoft Office, as well as a password-tracking utility and a face-recognition app. (The last lets you log on to your machine with your face via the Webcam, instead of by typing in a password.)



We did encounter some minor annoyances with the installed software. The first involved an app called HDD Protection, which pops up a notification every time you move the machine around. This is, in a way, a good thing, in that it’s tied to an accelerometer that senses when the system is falling and parks the hard drive heads to protect your data. The problem is that Toshiba’s settings were too sensitive for us; we were able to adjust the sensitivity to our liking. Another stumbling block was the installed Best Buy PC App, which pops up automatically and allows you to buy (or download for free) additional software for your PC. While this feels like a hard sell at first, when you consider the alternative (having Toshiba preinstall a bunch of software that you don't necessarily want), you may prefer this approach.



For $899, the Toshiba Satellite E305-S1990X is a remarkable package. When you take into consideration the standout design, excellent performance, longer-than-average battery life, and two-year warranty, it's the best all-around thin-and-light available now. The $899 Samsung QX410 is the closest competitor we've tested with similar specs, but it only tops the E305 in the battery-life department. The also-excellent Satellite M645 comes in at $1,099, but it only tops the E305 in any meaningful way in 3D performance. And in both of those categories, even though the E305 isn’t the best, it's still very strong, making for a remarkably balanced and well-priced notebook.



Price (at time of review): $899.99 (at Best Buy, as tested)



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