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The headteacher of Holderness Academy and Sixth Form in Hull, West Yorkshire, Scott Wilson, apologised for the blunder

The smoker threw it out on Peterson Road and, helped by 30 mph winds, the blaze broke out Monday outside the Travis AFB South Gate near Highway 12 and Walters Rd in Solano County.

In fact, this solid system includes bells and whistles, such as a wide 15.4-inch display and dedicated CD-control buttons, typically found on more expensive laptops. If speed and screen space are your top priorities, go with the Satellite A75-S206 instead. Deviating from the banality of black, Toshiba gave the Satellite A75-S206 a royal blue lid. Toshiba Satellite A75-S206

The Satellite A75-S206 offers the lowest price of Toshiba’s 2004 back-to-school laptops, but by no means does this mainstream laptop look cheap. Unfortunately, our Labs’ battery drain tests revealed less exciting news: the Satellite A75-S206’s battery cut out more than two hours sooner than the mainstream Dell Inspiron 1150’s. The effect is nice–if you like blue–but we wish the company offered snap-on lid covers in different colors. If you value very long battery life at minimal cost, Dell’s Inspiron 1150 is a great catch. Still, the laptop’s generous width allows for a spacious, comfortable keyboard, with crisp key feedback. The Toshiba Satellite A75-S206 weighs 7.7 pounds (9.2 pounds with the big AC adapter), and it measures 1.8 inches high, 14.4 inches wide, and 10.8 inches deep–a reasonable heft for a mainstream laptop but much too heavy for daily trips to class or frequent business travel. The A75-S206 broadcasts tunes from two wrist-rest speakers that sound clear, if not rich. And the Toshiba Satellite A75-S206’s virtues extend to performance: its mobile Pentium 4 processor rocked CNET Labs’ benchmarks. Unfortunately, the display’s relatively low 1,280×800 native resolution offers less screen real estate than other systems. The back edge is home to ports that include one for S-Video out, one VGA, one parallel, a 56Kbps modem, a 10/100 Ethernet, and two USB 2.0 ports; there’s a third USB 2.0 port on the right edge, along with a headphone jack, a microphone port, and a couple of handy extras: a wireless on/off switch to conserve battery power and a volume-control wheel. There’s even room on the keyboard’s left side for the DVD/CD-RW drive’s control buttons; the drive plays CDs without booting up. While many mainstream laptop manufacturers take this tack to save cash, the fact that you can’t customize your A75 system irks us.

For a mainstream laptop, the Toshiba’s array of ports and slots falls right on the money.

The Satellite A75’s five configurations have five different model numbers (our evaluation system was the A75-S206), but they all use many of the same basic components. Also onboard is a fast Atheros 802.11b/g wireless mini PCI card and a preloaded version of Microsoft’s pared-down office suite, Microsoft Works. Toshiba’s Web site offers the Satellite A75 line in five preconfigured versions; in-store versions may vary. The more expensive versions of the Satellite A75 also offer FireWire ports and useful five-in-one card readers that accommodate SmartMedia, Memory Stick, Secure Digital, MultiMedia, and &siteid=7&edid=&lop=txt&destcat=olympus&destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eolympusamerica%2Ecom%2Fcpg%5Fsection%2Fcpg%5Fxd%2Easp” rel=”noopener noreferrer nofollow” target=”_blank” data-component=”externalLink”>xD-Picture flash memory cards. Thanks to its Mobile Pentium 4 518-2.8GHz processor, the Toshiba Satellite A75-S206 shone in CNET Labs’ mobile performance test. Each Satellite A75 runs a mobile Pentium 4 processor with Intel’s much-hyped &siteid=7&edid=&lop=txt&destcat=intel&destUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eintel%2Ecom%2Ftechnology%2Fhyperthread%2Findex%2Ehtm%3Fiid%3Dsr+hyper%26″ rel=”noopener noreferrer nofollow” target=”_blank” data-component=”externalLink”>Hyper-Threading technology, tribal owl svg an average 512MB of memory, and an aging ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 graphics chip that borrows up to 64MB of video RAM from the main memory. The laptop’s left edge accommodates an infrared port and one Type II PC Card slot.

The only variables among the five configurations are processor speed (2.8GHz, 3.06GHz, and 3.2GHz); hard drive size (60GB or 80GB); operating system (Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional); and optical-disc drive type (CD-RW/DVD-ROM or DVD Super-Multi Drive, which reads and writes all of the standard CD and DVD formats along with the more niche DVD-RAM format). For one, this processor has a faster internal clock than that of the Pentium 4-2.66GHz processor found in both the Dell Inspiron 1150 and the HP Compaq Business Notebook nx9010. As a result, the Toshiba system led its closest rival, the Dell Inspiron 1150 by 13 percent, and it beat the HP nx9010 by a whopping 45 percent.

In addition, the Satellite A75-S206’s Mobile Pentium 4 518 has a 1MB L2 cache compared to the comparison systems’ 0.5MB cache. A broad, 15.4-inch display stretches out above the board, which should’ve made the A75-S206 especially well suited for DVD viewing.