I use a Toshiba Portege M400 tablet PC as my primary computer. At home, I add an optical mouse and thats it, mostly becaue of the tiny workspace I have in my den. On the road, I suffer with the small toucpad, or more often, twist the screen and use the pen. In the office, however, I prefer using a large desktop monitor and a full-sized keyboard and mouse. That means a docking station, and after playing with the older Portege M200 and its amazing dock, I knew I would buy this.

First off, this unit does what a good docking station should do. It has pass-throughs for all of the ports except, strangely, audio out. This is a strange omission, as I'm sure many users keep a large set of desktop speakers right there with their monitor, keyboard mouse and other peripherals. Why then, do I need to plug in the audio cable to my speakers to the laptop itself when everything else is plugged directly to the dock. It has Ethernet, modem pass-through, four USB 2.0 ports, VGA and even AC power. Firewire isn't on the dock either, but thats not so common in the PC world (more a Mac thing). The dock even supplements the laptop's VGA port and its docking station duplicate with a digital DVI port, which makes for better video on a digital monitor. Only that single, lonely audio cable has to be plugged in.

Okay, onward and upward. Well, there is no upward. The Portege M200 had a unique rotating base that allowed easy positioning of the laptop as a second monitor IN TABLET MODE. This was a big deal, as a tablet PC lends itself to writing on and marking the screen with the digitizer pen. On the M200, you could even rotate the docked notebook between portrait and landscape modes, BRILLIANT. On the M400's dock, its just a plain, ordinary flat dock. Yes, you can open the display and use it as a second monitor, but there is no way to twist it into portrait mode, and since you are using the laptop's hinge to keep the screen open, its too loose and flexible to do much writing or marking with the pen, unless you use your off-hand to hold the display frame steady. A serious let-down after the genius of the M200 dock.

In every other respect, this is typical Toshiba, which means well designed and well made. Porta are all along the back, which can be inconvenient on a laptop's chasis where they are difficult to reach (the M400 puts most ports conveniently on the sides), but make sense on a dock, where everything stays hooked up and rearward ports make for a cleaner desk. DVI works well with the Intel GMA950 video and really improves picture quality compared to VGA. My 19" Samsung 913T monitor supports both and I've done the A/B comparison, with DVI the easy winner. In fact, rather than using the small 12" screen as your second monitor, the M400 dock allows the simultaneous connection of an analog monitor to the dock's VGA and a digital monitor to the dock's DVI port. I tried this with another 19" Samsung LCD and the results were spectacular.

Convenient power and ejct buttons on the dock itself make it easy to use with the laptop's display closed, and undocing, even with four USB devices connected (keyboard, mouse, scanner and external hard drive) takes only seconds. undocking is very easy, with a single lever disconnecting the PC and gently lifting it out of the dock. Docking is just as easy, line up the guide posts in the front with the guide holeson the PC case and then press down gently on the back of the laptop.

Overall, I really like the M400 dock. Yes, I REALLY wish it had the same wonderful features of the M200's docking station, but I'm sure that one was jsut too expensive to build. As a conventional dock without the fancy display modes, this is a terrific product, with dual display output deserving of very high praise indeed. Still, I just keep thinking about how great it could have been.

Recommended: Yes