Review on Dynabook Tecra A40 J Notebook I5 1135G7 14", ‎PYS36U-01903Q, HDMI by Robert Walker

If you're like me, you've probably never heard of Dynabook, at least not until you realize it's the same brand that used to make laptops under the Toshiba name. It's still owned by Sharp Corporation, they only changed the name in 2018, they even still sell the Satellite laptop model. This Tecra A 40 J looks more like a business oriented ultrabook but performs well enough for general use like a personal laptop. If you get it, I strongly recommend adding another stick of 8GB DDR4 3200MHz memory. The Micron brand stick is already installed, but you can use a different brand if you prefer. After that, I noticed a significant performance boost from dual-channel memory mode (compared to single-channel). The laptop is equipped with an 11th Gen Core i5 (i5-1135G7) processor which is not the latest but is slightly inferior to the current 12th Gen and could be better in some ways as it doesn't use their new architecture , which mixes efficient cores with traditional, more powerful cores that support Hyper-Threading. It's a 28W TDP quad-core, eight-thread processor built on a 10nm processing node and performs well enough for this class of laptop. For storage, you get 256GB of PCIe 1.3 NVMe, and that's a lot faster than SATA SSDs. I have a read speed of 2387 MB/s and a write speed of 1765 MB/s (sequential). Security seems to be something that sets them apart from other laptop vendors. Firstly, the BIOS used on this laptop is written by Dynabook themselves, which is not usually the case with other brands that sell laptops. This is included with Windows 10 Pro and enables BitLocker encryption by default. I was able to upgrade to Windows 11 Pro without any problems as it supports all the essential security features that are required by Microsoft (e.g. TPM, virtualization-based core isolation, secure boot, etc.). So it's not just marketing as this laptop is in a safer state than many others on the market. It can be set up with the built-in smart card reader and a Windows Hello-enabled webcam, but on this particular device it only comes with a fingerprint reader for quick unlock via Windows Hello. I was impressed with the two Thunderbolt 4 ports on the side of this computer, which isn't very common at $850. It also has Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, two USB-A ports, a micro SD card reader, a headphone jack and a charging socket (although you can charge via USB-C via the Thunderbolt ports). It might not be the most interesting laptop in its class. a very crowded market, but it's durable, thin and light, with good performance and a forward-thinking port selection. I think it would be a little more compelling if it was around $700, but there's really nothing missing at that price point.