Living With the Dynabook Portégé X40L-K

pcmag.com:

For years, the enterprise PC market has been dominated by Dell, HP, and Lenovo with little room for anything else except the occasional Mac. Dynabook, the company that used to be Toshiba PC and is now owned by Sharp (which is in turn controlled by Foxconn), is now pushing to reenter this market, with a series of machines that meet all the enterprise requirements, including Intel vPro support.

I’ve been trying out the company’s Portégé X40L-K, the lightweight 14-inch notebook in the Dynabook family. Note the L stands for lightweight, as Dynabook makes a heavier 14-inch model; and the K designates the year, signifying in part that it is based on the 12th Generation Intel Core (Alder Lake) processor. I’ve found the machine to be very lightweight and portable, with a lot of features, but also a few shortcomings.

The basic design looks much like other Windows laptop, somewhat distinguished by a matte dark blue color. With a magnesium alloy case, it’s about the same size as other 14-inch enterprise laptops, just 0.63 inch thick. It weighs just 2.31 pounds by itself and 3.08 pounds with the included 65-watt charger, making it the lightest 14-inch enterprise notebook I’ve yet tested.

The Portégé has a much larger selection of ports than I’m used to in a machine this thin. The left-hand side has a Kensington lock, HDMI port, USB-A port and two US B-C/Thunderbolt ports (which are used for charging). The right-hand side has a microSD slot, a full-size Ethernet jack (with a cover that pulls down so it doesn’t impact the lines of the machine), another USB-A port, and a headphone/microphone jack. A fingerprint reader is built into the power button to the top right of the keyboard, and that worked fine with Windows Hello. While I could