The Toshiba Satellite M105 has a lot of horsepower. It’s got more than enough to get you started on your first video-editing project and casually play with your latest batch of home photos. This capable laptop comes with an Intel Core Duo processor and a 100GB hard drive—not bad for a system just over $1,000 (MSRP).

Tipping the scales at 5.2 pounds, the M105 is one of the lightest budget Core Duo notebooks on the market. Its 14.1-inch TruBrite widescreen is bright and crisp and provides plenty of room for watching a full-length DVD movie. It gives great color depth to photos.

The notebook’s speakers support SRS TruSurround sound technology, which makes music and movies sound especially good for a laptop. The M105 has several media buttons for DVD playback, including buttons for play/pause, stop, rewind, and fast forward. There are also two more buttons to access a preboot application, which plays your movies and music without needing to load Microsoft Windows. ... read more

The M105 even has a FireWire port, so you can transfer digital video and images to and from your camcorder. At 100GB, the hard drive is nice and roomy, even adequate for storing any big video files you may create. In addition, you get four USB ports (yeah!), an S-Video port, and a 4-in-1 card reader (xD, SD, MS, MS Pro). There’s a dual-layer DVD drive to archive important files onto a DVD (you don’t want to lose those graduation pics in a hard-drive crash, do you?). If you use dual-layer media, you can fit up to 8.5GB of material on one disc.

The M105 carries a 1.67-GHz Intel Core Duo T2300 processor. Even in this budget price range, this dual-core CPU is what you should want. The system also comes with 512MB of RAM, and though that may be okay today, I strongly suggest getting 1GB. The integrated graphics will need some of that to run, and when you upgrade to Windows Vista, perhaps next year, you’ll be happy you have the extra memory.

Though the Satellite doesn’t have the longest battery life of the value laptops it can run for almost 4 hours 38 minutes, which isn’t too shabby either.

All in all, one would have liked to have seen the Toshiba Satellite M105 ship with more RAM. Even with this deficiency, however, it’s a great inexpensive notebook, with a lot of horsepower and not a lot of carrying weight. You can feel comfortable parting with your hard-earned cash for it.