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The Toshiba Tecra R940-1CW presents itself with all the trappings of being the complete business laptop. It's packed with specialist hardware and software, much of which is slightly vestigial for most users.
Its comprehensiveness is its main selling point, but it comes at the cost of usability. For some, this trade-off will be necessary, but the end result is a laptop that's a little bulky, has some build quality issues and underperforms in several key areas.
We liked
As we said, the Toshiba Tecra R940-1CW is nothing if not feature-packed. Intel vPro support, a fingerprint scanner, hard drive encryption, VGA and DisplayPort outputs, an optical drive, an ExpressCard slot and eSATA are all here. Yes, including them all seems to compromise the laptop, but their inclusion is good.
The outer build quality is also good - we like the grooved design on the lid and it feels solid when closed.
We disliked
A lot of our problems with the Toshiba Tecra R940-1CW stem from its price. The performance isn't too bad, but we've seen better for £1,250 (around AU$1,907/US$1,992).
The screen would be pretty standard on a low-end Ultrabook, but this is several hundred pounds more than the low end. The inner build quality could be forgiven on a cheaper laptop, but not for this price. Ditto to the trackpad being so basic.
The battery life is probably the worst of these, though. A modern business machine is more than capable of running all day - we've seen it on plenty of thin and light laptops - but this falls badly short.
Final verdict
The Toshiba Tecra R940-1CW is packed with business features, and if you just can't do without them, it's a reasonable choice.
But ask yourself if you really need fingerprint security, Intel vPro features and a trackpoint. For many business users, usability, speed and battery life are the most important things, and for this amount of money, a high-end Ultrabook - such as the Asus Zenbook Prime - is perhaps a better choice.
