Some people may not care for Toshiba's shiny smooth keyboard keys, but I'm not one of them: they are well-separated, have good travel, and I like the placement of Delete, Home, Page Up, Page Down and End keys in a column above the right cursor key, which makes inadvertent taps on the backspace key less likely. The touchpad is flush with the rest of the case; it supports multitouch and is reasonably responsive-but if you prefer installing a mouse, Toshiba provides a small button right above the touch pad to toggle it off or on.

You get a 640GB hard drive, although it only spins at 5400 rpm, and the DVD burner located towards the front of the left side supports 11 DVD read and write formats. The port configuration is pretty good: On the left edge, you get two USB 2.0 ports (right behind the DVD drive), along with a combined SD/Memory Stick reader. On the right edge, there's one combined USB 2.0/e-SATA port (which also can charge USB devices when the notebook isn't powered up); and ports for gigabit ethernet, HDMI and PC (RGB) displays, headphone and mike jacks, and a lock slot.

The 802.11n Wi-Fi, disappointingly, supports only 2.4ghz operations (meaning it's backwards compatible with 802.11b/g but not 802.11a gear). There's no support for the 5ghz band, which has more non-overlapping channels and therefore is a lot less prone to interference, making it a better choice for streaming media.

Toshiba as usual insists on preloading all sorts of services and utilities that you may or may not want or need (I counted 16 in the startup list). I'm not crazy about most of these, although the disc creation and webcam utilities are obviously useful when you need them. (However I don't care for the way Toshiba chooses to make its webcam utility accessible, as a fly-out window that appears when you move your cursor along the left edge of the display. Some might also find the ReelTime document and media organizer helpful, but again, I wish Toshiba didn't run it by default.

There's also a lot of third-party software. The most useful items are the ad-supported starter edition of Office 2010 and a Corel disc label creation application. I resented having the Norton security trial offer in my face every time I booted up (and having "Stay Unprotected" as the option you click to get rid of it..."Not interested" would be more accurate and less insinuating of neglect on my part.)