Toshiba T2060 - 14 months old - Upgrade or dump?

My problems:

• It takes 3-4 seconds to start Firefox
• The battery time is 90 minutes according to toshiba.com, in real life it is 15 minutes.
• General speed issues, the T2060 seems very easily stressed. It's slower than my last P4 3.0 GHz workstation (2003), even though 4 years newer.

Hardware:

• Intel CPU T2060 (1MB cache)
• 80GB 7200RPM
• Bad-*** battery
• Windows Vista Home Basic

Your advise please. The notebook is only 14 months old. Should I sell this worthless peace of **** or consider upgrading to a newer processor and new battery?

 

3-4 seconds to start Firefox is quite normal un such a system as you can see in these benchmarks on a 1,86 Core 2 Duo with newer harddrives:
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/storage/intel-x25-m.aspx?page=6
It probably also matters how many addons, bookmarks, hystory you have. My Firefox boots quicker on a much older system.

Your battery is probably broken and needs replacement.

If you want to make your system faster, first consider a clean install (Vista, or even better: XP).

If you run Vista make sure to disable many processes that stress your system.

How many processes do you have running in Vista?

 

It just took me 15 seconds to close all the remaining 5 open windows:
Winamp
3 Explorer Windows
Outlook

I just benchmarked Firefox starting on both my T2060 laptop, my brothers P4 3.0 GHz and Q6600 workstation:
T2060 - 7.0 seconds
Q6600 - 1.5 seconds
P4 3.0 GHz - 2.0 seconds (close to Q6600 really)

Outlook 2007 Start-up time is even worse. It will take 15 seconds for Outlook to start up.

When multiple processes are running, Outlook and uTorrent... the speed goes zero. Where my workstation and even P4 did quite a good job... this laptop is fainting... dying... it's having a hard time to process both Outlook- and uTorrent-bits or Quickpar-bits at once.

3-4 times a week I just have to reset the laptop, because it has crashed and doesn't respond, even if I wait for 2-3 minutes for it to process.

I have tried XP, but I switched back to Vista. The Vista install is currently 3-4 months old and fairly clean as I don't game and/or use applications as Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc.

 

OK. How many processes do you have running in Vista?

How much memory do you have?

 

This sounds like a RAM issue, how much memory do you have installed?

 

PhilFlow: I apologize for not having answered that question before. I have 64 Vista processes running. I have carefully disabled unneccesary software from starting when booting Vista using msconfig.

I have 1GB DDR RAM.

http://nl.computers.toshiba-europe....ervice=NL&PRODUCT_ID=124802&toshibaShop=false

 

OK your brother workstation doesn't have a Pentium 4, it has an Intel Core 2 Duo Quade cores. It's like he has 4 CPUs while you have only 2 CPUs. Beside each of his CPUs run at 2.4ghz, while each of your cores run at 1.6ghz.

You shoudn't through your laptop away. You should upgrade it instead. How much ram do you have? Photoshop needs a lot of ram so if you have 1 or 2GB, upgrading to 3 or 4GB will make your laptop faster.

What your laptop name? does it use an intel or an Ati chipset (200M)?
If it's the Ati Chip that you can pin mod your T2060 to run at 2.0Ghz instead of 1.6Ghz. This is a 33% increase.

If you don't have the ATI chipset than your only option CPU-wise is to upgrade it to a faster one. The intel T7200, T7400 and the T7600 are your best options.
Note you need to confirm your laptop model so we can confirm that the above CPUs will work in your laptop. If they don't we could propose some other models

 

Ok 1 GB is definetely not enough for Vista. You should have at least 2GB (or better 3GB but your system does not seem to support it according to toshiba). 1GB is enough for XP though.

64 processes for Vista is not bad. Upgrading your memory should give a good speed boost.

By the way, I have a 3 year old Asus Pentium 4 mobile 1.6GHz with 1GB and 160GB Samsung HDD, Firefox boots in 2 seconds. (But I keep Firefox clean.)

 

Hmm... What antivirus software do u have on your laptop? I'm thinking that may be the problem (a virus)

 

Thank you for your great response. It really encourages me to investigate before making irrational decisions.

I have upgraded my Toshiba L30-106 from 512MB to 1GB RAM. Toshiba said 512MB was enough, but I wanted to upgrade. Unfortunatly the OS is still not as fast as I hoped it to be.

I also keep Firefox clean and only use the Foxmarks, Adblock, Mcafee and Dictionary add-ons.

My virusscanner is McAfee Internet Security 2007. It does the trick and I haven't had viruses on this laptop's current Vista install afaik. The current Vista install is 3 months old.

naton: My brother has XP running on a Pentium 3.0 GHz, I am positive about that. His workstation and my older workstation, both were a lot faster than this laptop.

My old P4 2.4 GHz, my old AMD64 3000+, my brother's P4 3.0 GHz. They were all a lot faster than this laptop. My workstation is currently a Q6600 and I love it. Unfortunatly working on my laptop currently looses me a lot of time due bad performance. I do 3 times as much work on my workstation as I can do on my laptop currently.

This is my first laptop and I'm partially doubting that laptop's performance can ever come close to workstation's performance regarding performing lots of tasks simultaniously.

 

1GB in your case is not enough. Check the task manager and you'll see that most of the ram if not all of it is used by Vista and Mcafee. If I'm not mistaken Vista uses as start something like 700-800MB. If you add to that the 100-200MB used by Mcafee, you'll be left with nothing to run the other applications. Hence your laptop sollicitate your hard drive often to emulate some of the ram needed. Since the harddrive read and write is much slower that the RAM, your laptop feel slower.

Your best option is at least 2GB.

I've misread your second post. I thought that your brother had only one desktop with the intel Q6600

I bet they run WindowsXP not Vista.
With XP + Mcafee + loads of other small apps the max ram used will be no more that 300-400MB.
Compared to XP, Vista is heavier, and ressource hungry. When I say resource hungry I need heavy on the RAM, Hardrdrive, Graphics Card, and Memory.

As I said before, you can't compare a beast like the Q6600 with the T2060. If you can't afford to go for 2GB or more in your laptop, then I advice you to use windows XP instead of Vista, and I guarranty that your laptop will be faster.

At least two membres of the forum have killer laptops (after upgrade). One of them have the same processor as you workstation in his laptop (the Q6600). An other one is using a server opetron cpu in his laptop. So I leave to imagine how fast their laptops are

Your laptop is not one of toshiba horspower. The Tecra series from Toshiba would have been more suited for your line of work. Try to upgrade the RAM. If in addition to the ram you can downgrade to windows XP it would even be better. If still no satisfied, upgrading the CPU will surelly make you a happy man. Including the CPU upgrade you'll find yourself with a fast machine and it will cost you less that going out and buying a new one.

 

crucial.com said that your system (satellite L30) will only support 2g ram. With vista basic that should be plenty. For a basic e-mail client the win mail that come with vista basic should work fast. Mine does. It opens in a couple seconds the first time and then very fast for the next openings. You might want to try it instead of outlook.

 

I have bought a new laptop! A Q210.

Thank you for answering my questions.

I will sell my current laptop. Take a look at the attachment. It has started with 45 minutes battery and is 14 minutes now! (lol)

I am happy that I'm going to get myself a better notebook this time!

 

I guess that you have watched a lot of DVDs using your battery, hence why it doesn't charge a lot.

Q: Did you try to calibrate your battery by doing several cycles of full charge and full descarge (2 to 3)?

Good luck with your new laptop

 

I have a lot of movies, not optical DVD's.

My notebook unfortunately does not have the option to calibrate it's battery in the bios.

 

I think that most laptops don't have the calibration via bios. None the less, the calibration can be done manualy. You charge the battery to full, disconnect the AC and use your laptop until it switches itself off. You repeat this 2 or three times.