Toshiba Tecra M5
sduford on Oct 05 2006 at 12:40 pm | Filed under: Hardware
Last month my employer upgraded my laptop from a Toshiba Tecra M2 to a new M5. This M5 has an Intel Centrino Duo dual-core CPU and 2GB of RAM. Pretty slick. Now, in everyday computing I do not notice any performance improvement, but when I run virtual machines or do photo processing I see about a 50% speed improvement. Not too shaby, especially since the battery life has actually improved.
One of the neatest features of this machine though is that it has a built-in fingerprint reader. Instead of logging-in to the machine, I just swipe a finger on the reader. As long as I keep the reader clean, it works great. The software that comes with it also enables me to use the reader to automatically enter any password for any application or website. Very handy, except that it means I will forget my passwords a lot more often! Another neat thing is the hard-disk vault, which enables me to create secure encrypted folders on my hard drive that can only be accessed via fingerprint. I can even protect the whole hard drive. So if I ever lose my laptop, assuming that Toshiba did a good job, it should be very hard for anyone to get into my data.
