(unofficial) A135-s2276 Windows XP Re-Review

Uh. This isn't an official review or anything. It's specific to Toshiba users, really. That's why it's uploaded here, and not in the Reviews section.

So, way back when in February of this year, I purchased the infamous Toshiba A135 s2276. The machine was to my liking, so I wrote a review and submitted it to NotebookReview.com. I have no idea what happened to it (it's not up on the site anywhere, I don't think), but whatever. That's not what this is about.

(unofficial) Toshiba A135 s2276 Re-Review: Windows XP
looking at what could have been​

Voluntarily created by Miles Huang for the NotebookReview.com community.

Catalyst for Change
In my past review of this laptop, I assumed that the major shortcomings could be solved with the addition of a 512MB stick of RAM to augment the 512MB the laptop was struggling with at the time. I actually added 1GB of RAM, bringing the total up to around 1.4GB of RAM after the integrated graphics chip sucked up its share.

Oh yes, Vista loved that. It gobbled up over 700MB of the RAM the moment it loaded. Suddenly, several things became much easier, and the dual core T2060 could finally live up to its multitasking purpose in life. Everything was going fine until several things clued me into the fact that not everything was... well, fine.

First of all, I had expected the extra RAM to allow Toshiba FlashCards (you know, that annoying utility that you have to use for the Fn buttons, or else they don't always work right?) to, well, function properly. See, it lagged. A lot. I would press down the Fn button, and everything would go to hell for the next few seconds while FlashCards tried to load itself up and display its pretty face on the screen. Secondly, has anyone other than me noticed the graphics lag on this laptop? You play a game, or run some other semi-intense-while-still-mediocre video experience, and then it becomes very choppy. Average frame rate might be okay, but the periodic (and by periodic, I mean every few seconds) video lag begins to get to you sometimes.

So I decided to investigate. Let's take Neverwinter Nights (the first one) for example. I was playing it on Vista for a while, and it was one of the worst gaming experiences ever. With medium graphics, the game lagged every few seconds and was entirely too jumpy to play. Well, the next step was to try the lowest graphics settings. Huh. Laggy too. Well that's weird. This game is like, old – relative to some of the new games we have now, at any rate. And this laptop is fairly new.

After several incidents like this, I went into Vista's partition manager and cropped myself a small partition, and installed Ubuntu Linux on that partition.

This laptop couldn't handle the desktop effects on 'buntu, much less Beryl (I did try installing it though – it's a driver nightmare, and I didn't succeed). But that's not what I was after. I installed Wine, and began trying out some graphics trips. And what do you know?

Neverwinter Nights was running far smoother on Linux in Wine than it ran in Vista, natively. Well heck, that surprised me. What surprised me more was that it was doing so on medium graphics settings.

So what's a guy to do? Tear down his Vista partition and load up good ol' Windows XP, of course.

Journey to Nirvana
As I'm sure many of you are aware, Toshiba never released the drivers for Windows XP on its A135 line. Guess what this means? That's right! No wireless!

Time to get that ethernet cable out and download us some drivers.

http://www.mediafire.com/?5jzw0gmnz4i

Ok, well, after installing Windows XP and burning those drivers to CD, you go into Control Panel -> Add Hardware (with the drivers CD in, of course). You're going to have to install one driver at a time. Gradually, those little yellow warning things will go away. Work at it. Some issues:

1. MAKE SURE you pick the right wireless driver. I picked the wrong one before, and my wireless card wouldn't work. I think the right one is the one with the path that ends with “...\oem1”, but I'm not sure because I did this a while ago.
2. THE SOUND driver may not work. I don't know about you, but I was installing XP clean, one of the first versions, no service pack 1 or 2. My sound was not working at first, but then I installed SP2, and... tada! Speakers magically started to function.

Whee, we have us some XP.

Well yes, you're going to have to load up all your software too. Avast Antivirus, OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox, and whatever else you want. It's a fresh install, after all.

The last step is to remove that annoying Windows Vista sticker from the case. And maybe replace it with an XP sticker. Even better, a “Designed for Microsoft Windows XP” sticker.

Baptism by Fire

Power Options
Okay. Whatever you do, DON'T PUT THE LAPTOP TO SLEEP. Sleep is the bane of your convenience when you have XP installed on this laptop with these drivers. Instead, enable hibernation in the power options menu, and change the settings so that the laptop goes into hibernation instead of sleep.

The reason for this is because something is not playing nice with XP, and when your laptop awakes from sleep (aka suspend-to-RAM), the screen does not come back on. I've heard that it could be/is the Omega video driver, but whatever. Hibernation solves the problem for me, despite the fact that it 1) needs hard drive space, and 2) takes longer to wake up than sleep. Actually, it's much faster than waking from sleep, because it doesn't wake from sleep at all.

The other major power concern that arises is screen brightness. With regard to this, there is some good news and some bad news. The good news: in Windows XP, you don't have that FlashCards app. The bad news: that FlashCards app seems to be the only way to control screen brightness. There are many people out there searching for a way to adjust the brightness of the backlight (not the screen, the backlight), and I invite you to join them in this quest for the holy grail.

Personally, I would just hook up a potentiometer to one of the wires that goes to the inverter, but I don't have time to do that. Maybe after school lets out. Oh, and don't do this, because it voids the warranty.

At any rate, screen brightness has not been too much of an issue for me. When you take the laptop off of AC power, the screen dims automatically (or should – it does on mine at any rate), and this seems to save enough power for me to retain over two hours of battery life. I don't actually know how long.

Extraneous Functionality
Download drivers for the touchpad from Synaptic's website.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting the media buttons or the Fn keys to work. However, it was a pleasant surprise when the media keys did work (though only with Windows Media Player, as in Vista), as well as the browser button. The media player button, however, does not work. Most of the Fn keys do not, either. Fn + Esc works to mute the volume Fn + F10 (scroll lock) and Fn + F11 (number pad) work as well. However, none of the other ones work, except Fn + F3, suspend-to-RAM. NEVER PRESS THIS. It makes your laptop go to sleep, which is discussed above. Actually, I don't know if Fn + F5 works, because I have not tried hooking my laptop to an external monitor yet.

Oh, and remember that little Toshiba utility, Acoustic Silencer? Yeah, that one. The one that made your drive nice and quiet. You're going to have to download it from Toshiba's website if you want it. I just looked through driver/software downloads for other Toshiba laptops until I found an XP version.

Benchmarks
What we've all been waiting for, right? Or just me, I guess. Whatever.

Super Pi
Windows Vista Home Basic:
1m 59s to calculate 2 million digits of pi.


Windows XP Professional SP2:
1m 59s to calculate 2 million digits of pi.


No real surprises there, if you think about it. Super Pi just tests the power of the CPU. Vista was just as ready to relinquish the CPU as XP was when it came to crunching some big numbers.

3DMark05
Windows Vista Home Basic:
483 3DMarks


Windows XP Professional SP2:
587 3DMarks


PCMark05
Windows Vista Home Basic:
2175 PCMarks


Windows XP Professional SP2:
2636 PCMarks


HDTune
Windows Vista Home Basic:
Average: 32.5 MB/sec


Windows XP Professional SP2:
Average: 35.3 MB/sec


What can I say? This laptop just performs better with XP. Sadly, I do not own the full version of PCMark05 so I can't tell you how the specific tests went. And how does Neverwinter Nights fare on XP? Well, I can run it smoothly with almost full graphics. Hear that? It was incredibly choppy with the lowest graphics settings in Vista, and is now running near full on XP.

Conclusion
Well, there's not much else to say. Toshiba designed a laptop that would run XP perfectly, but shipped it out with Vista. I have no idea what they were thinking, but I'm happy I switched anyways. Sure, there are some minor drawbacks, such as the inability to adjust the screen brightness, but I believe the performance increase justifies this. I can't say I miss Toshiba FlashCards.

What I really wish for is an official ATI driver for XP on this laptop. The Omega drivers work fine for mostly everything, but not being able to sleep is a bugger.

Pros

• Noticably faster, especially in terms of graphics
• In fact, I'm actually able to play games now with a rather decent frame rate
• No more annoying FlashCards apps
• Sturdy – see below

Cons

• Most Fn keys do not work, most notably Fn + F6 and Fn + F7
• Unable to suspend-to-RAM
• I do kind of miss Windows Sidebar with its humongous clock. I don't really want to download anything to replace it, though.

Other Things
Oh yes, I have to say that this is a surprisingly sturdy little thing. Either that, or I'm just a really really lucky person. Since I bought this laptop, it has seen a lot of abuse. The backlight would not turn on one day, but that was the fault of a loosely connected FL inverter. I have dropped this laptop from a height of three feet (I can tell you the day, too – it was the Saturday before last, 8 September 2007), and the machine didn't even hiccup. Maybe that was luck. You're not supposed to be able to do that. Nothing is broken, and everything still works. Take care of this laptop better than I do, and it will last you a while.

And does anyone out there use Alias/Autodesk Maya? If you install it on XP, the Omega video drivers will cause it to crash on the splash screen while loading. To fix this problem, download ATI Tray Tools (and while installing it, BE SURE TO DISABLE OVERCLOCKING OR IT WILL BSOD ON YOU), and then use ATI Tray Tools to disable triple buffering. The path is OpenGL > Additional options > Triple Buffering.