The M70-159 initially looks large for a 15.4” monitor notebook, this is due to the wide screen used, but still the notebook is not much larger than other standard 15” notebooks, just a little wider. While we cannot consider it true lightweight notebook, it is one of the lightest 15.4” notebooks, weighting only 2.7kg. The chassis is made from polycarbonate ABS (or simply, plastic) and feels durable enough, although we found it is prone to scratches. The color of the chassis is dolphin grey.

The monitor is perhaps the strongest feature of the M70-159. Toshiba chose to use a 15.4” trubrite wide XGA monitor with a native resolution of 1280x800 pixels. The aspect ratio of the screen is 16:10, which will make resolutions lower than 1280x800 looking quite bad as the notebook will stretch the image in order to fit the screen. Some may complain that Toshiba did not use a WXGA+ monitor (1440x900 pixels), but I find 1280x800 is a perfect resolution for this screen size. The brightness of the screen is user adjustable, for power saving purposes. Many people will be frightened by the response time of the monitor, which is rated at a nightmarish 50ms, yet we noticed little to no ghosting through our tests with videos and games. The refresh rate however may cause issues for some people.

The right side of the laptop is home to the Express Card port, next to it resides the Matshita DVD-RAM drive. The drive performs quite well and we faced no problems at all while using it. Towards the front, you will find the sole PCMCIA card slot, for a Type II card. Moving towards the rear, there is an USB port, an i-Link Firewire port, a S-Video TV-out port and past the cooling vents a SVGA external monitor port.

The rear of the notebook has a Kensington lock and a RJ-11 modem port. Moving to the left, there are a RJ-45 10/100 LAN port, two extra USB ports and finally a DC power adapter port.

The audio ports are placed right in the middle at the front of the notebook for convenience to the user. There is a single headphone jack and a microphone jack, common for most notebooks. The volume control knob is right next to them. Moving towards the left side of the notebook, there is also a memory card reader slot for the most common types of cards. This is a very nice addition as many people use SD and MMC cards these days.