Toshiba NB305

The Mini NB305 is one of Toshiba's newest models and with a retail price of US $449, it is priced competitively with other netbooks we've tested.

However, the Toshiba stands apart from other netbooks because of its stellar looks and overall finish. The NB305's contrasting mocha brown lid and silver/gray keyboard give it a premium look and in hand, the Toshiba just feels solidly built. There's minimal flex when you hold the machine from one of its edges, the LCD's hinges feel solid and offer decent resistance and both keyboard and trackpad are a pleasure to use.   

The 10.1-inch widescreen LCD is fairly up-market in that it is bright, features excellent vibrancy and colours and sports a glossy finish. Performance-wise the Toshiba proved something of an underachiever; it returned PCMark 2005 CPU, memory and hard drive scores of 1489, 2539 and 4484. These figures were slightly lower than the numbers produced by other similarly configured, and priced, netbooks.The startup and shutdown times of 45- and 15-seconds were also rather sluggish.

Within Windows 7 the netbook struggled along at times and this is because it only has 1GB of RAM. As a result we noticed plenty of hard disk activity once the available memory was used. Given the installed RAM, the NB305 is better suited to run Windows XP.