A505-S6965 My Experirence

I picked up the Toshiba A505-S6965 on 8/11 from BB and wanted to weigh in with my opinion/experience so far. I spent a few weeks looking for a laptop to do pretty much everything except heavy photo/video and gaming. This laptop, in my opinion, should be more than sufficient for that.

Some of the features that really sold me on this laptop were the price, the backlit LED screen and the backlit keyboard. What I noticed while researching laptops was these features were usually included in the more expensive laptops. I am content with the brightness of the screen when laptop is plugged in, and when it running on battery power. I also discovered, that the laptop I have has Samsung PC6400 RAM (running 6-6-6-18) installed. The hard drive is pretty spacious, and it a newer Toshiba drive running @5400RPM. I setup a 170GB partiton for the OS and apps I will be using and a second partition of about 290GB. I cannot think of any actual complaints as of this post. Price, performance, features made it my final choice. The space bar and FN key do not light up on my Toshiba either. Overall, I am very pleased with a A505-S6965.

On to the fresh install...

I installed Vista Home Premium 64 w/Service Pack 2. Next, I installed the Intel INF chipset drivers from the Intel website. I installed the Realtek LAN driver from the Toshiba website. I then went to WINDOWS UPDATE and installed all IMPORTANT updates as well as the Intel Wifi Link 5100 AGN update.

I followed this with the graphics card installation (It was pretty simple IMO, but I will go into detail). I am not 100% positive, but I think the .NET needs to be installed/updated for Catalyst to work properly.


1. Download the driver from AMD/ATI website. (OS specific Radeon 4550)

2. I allowed the ATI driver to extract to:
C:\ATI\Support\9-7_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_wdm_enu

3. When it begins to install, cancel the installation.

4. Download the Mod tool here

5. Install and run the Mod tool. When the tool opens, look for the box that says Disable UAC. Check the box. It should notify you that a restart is required. Restart, and then run the tool again. Click browse and make sure this path C:\ATI\Support\9-7_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_wdm_enu\Driver is entered. Click modify and wait until it completes. At this point, I restarted again.

6. Make you way back into this folder: C:\ATI\Support\9-7_vista64_win7_64_dd_ccc_wdm_enu\Driver\

Find the SETUP application and double-click. When it is finished installing, restart your laptop.

I still have a few drivers to install, but nothing that has affected my ability to do the basics on this laptop (browsing, email, MS office).

I hope this helped some of you out there.

 

Heya -

Good informative post, thanks. Question for ya though..I did a fresh install on windows 7 RC (64 bit) and have installed all drivers from
Toshiba's site and the ATI catalyst junk , but I still have 2 devices that refuse to be recognized. Here's a screenshot:

 

You run into anything like that?

 

I told myself, prior to doing the fresh OS install, that I would screen shot the Device Manager...but I forget to do it. I do have an idea that might help both you and I. If some one out there still has a stock A505-S6965 (no changes to drivers or has not done a fresh OS install), and would not mind posting a screen shot of the device manager, I am sure it would help narrow down the possibilities.

 

My FN key and space bar don't light up.

I really enjoy my a505. Simply put XD

 

Thought I'd update on this for anyone who ran into the same problem. It's two device drivers for the RICOH card reader, the drivers are in the Toshiba driver pack.

Must have just missed them first time around ....

 

Schizm, when you say in the Toshiba driver pack, do you mean it has to be installed with other drivers at once or the drivers can be installed individually?

 

I can't remember if I have typed it, but I am another satisfied Toshiba laptop owner. Thank you Toshiba. I cannot honestly say I have bought personally or even used a Toshiba computing product before. However, after purchasing this A505-S6965, I will include the Toshiba brand in all my future research for mobile PCs. I believe that amount of gratitude is sufficient (I dropped the brand name three times ).

I have been using the laptop without any problems for a month now. The one thing I noticed was this, when using Auslogics Disk Defrag, I get an error shortly after running defrag on the C: Has anyone esle seen this? I will try and uninstall the program and re-install tomorrow.