If you need a laptop that can hold its own in your subterranean gaming dungeon, but that could also mingle in a black-and-white ball, your device has landed. The Toshiba A305 combines strong gaming performance with refined good looks - but it will take some moderate maintenance.
Why? Because it's so pretty. When you first pop open the A305, you may gasp a little: Reflective hematite stripes and and lacquered finish catch light, while the keys shimmer like little black candies, inviting your fingers to dance across them. But the mirrored surface also invites smudges to the party - a lot of them - which means you'll be spending time spiffing the thing up before it can be seen in public.
Then again, you don't buy oysters for their shells, but for the treasure inside, and the Toshiba's packed with goodies. An Intel T8100 processor, 3GB of RAM, and a 512MB ATI graphics chip provide punch for processing and playtime. Dual 200GB drives offer tons of room for HD video that you can pipe out to a TV through HDMI. Toshiba is still smarting from backing the wrong horse in the format war so there's no Blu-ray drive, just a DVD burner with LabelFlash (you flip special discs over and use the laser to inscribe your labels). An extended battery lends two hours of time away from an outlet - not bad for a desktop replacement, but it adds weight. And the fingerprint reader is just irritating, with an unintuitive applet that keeps bugging you to "enroll" and then hangs in some holding pattern when you try to. (Really, how hard is it to type a password?)
While the screen is bright and sharp, it's a little too reflective; if you don't like the way you look, use this laptop exclusively in the dark. And maybe that's where the Toshiba performs best. Slip in a DVD or a game in the darkness of your dungeon, watch the inset DVD controls glow coolly through the dark, game away in peace, and know that no one will ever see the smudges.