Aug 12, 2007 12:43 AM
1962 Views
I little background of my needs. I have been using a computer for over 16 years now and have spend most of my childhood in front of a computer. I am a very heavy user and I travel a lot hence I need the elusive combination of high speed as well as mobility.
I bought this laptop in Dec 2005 in UK where it sells under the name Equium series but comes with a 512Mb RAM as standard. The price was GBP800 at that time.
The first thing that I noticed was that whenever I use to put a device in the USB ports, the computer used to turn off. I got it replaced from the vendor but this incident made sure that I could never give a full rating to the laptop ever. The new model that I got made up a lot of it though.
This was one of the first laptops that shipped with TruBrite technology and the difference was amazing. In-fact everyone who saw this laptop for the next one month, friends, colleagues and even client representatives noticed and asked me about the screen.
There is a plethora of software that comes pre-installed with the system and some crapware like a trial of MS Notes. The good thing is that most of the toshiba software that run on startup don't slow down the system by a lot. In-fact the startup is a lot better than most other brands of laptop that I have seen.
The system is accompained with a recovery DVD which can be used to formay the drive and re-install the system to the state it was when it shipped. The worst part is that you cannot create custom partitions with the startup(at least not easily).
The sound quality of the speakers is decent, not loud but not feeble either. I did enounter some problem with the headphone jack after some months. My guess is that either the switchover from speaker to headphone got loose or rusted so when I used to connect my headphones, then on disconnecting the speakers didnt use to work. After some time, suddenly they would start working.
The battery is a 4 cell one which gives me around 2 hours even after 1.5 yrs. Still, considering the price, I would have preferred a 6 cell battery. The best thing about the laptop is that the processor is a multi-speed one and speed can be controlled from the system tray so you can reduce the processor speed which would reduce the running of the fan and as a result, will give you better battery life. Also this is useful if the processor is getting too hot which is very common in India. Just reduce the speed and cool down the system.
I later upgraded the RAM to 1 Gb as I needed to run VMWare on this and I would say, the processor was able to run Linux or Server 2003 without much hitch.
The thing that I hated about the laptop and cannot do anything is its keyboard. Unfortunately that seems to be the trend across Toshiba. If you compare the keyboard of toshiba to something like Sony or IBM or for the fact even Dell, the tactile feedback is noting. In-fact one may invest in a small bluetooth keyboard as that would be really handy.
Overall after using the laptop for this long, I went again with Toshiba U305. Same issue with this too, the keyboard is horrible.
I am not too sure how a review on one laptop may help as by the time you would know a laptop well enough to review, it is phased out. So maybe you can take this as a review of Toshiba series in general.
