A70 - Please Help

Hey,

I was looking for a low end ($1000) gaming laptop, and the Toshiba Satellite A70 with its 60GB hard drive, Raedon Graphic Card and 512MB ram attracted me as did the $900 price tag. However, I have heard TERRIBLE reviews of it breaking down, crashing and just randomly malfunctioning. I have a few questions

1)where would the best place to buy such a laptop be
2) is there any similar rival that has a better track record? 512MB ram and a Raedon video card are pretty hard to come by for less than 1k (The main game I want to play is The Sims 2)
3) Does anyone here own one? How had it been?

Thanks so much for all your help, I really appreciate it

 

I bought a A70 back in December when it was on sale for $1499 CDN at Future Shop. (3.06 Ghz P4, 40 GB hard drive) It was the first laptop I'd bought, but I wasn't completely happy with it so I ended up returning it. I just found it to be very loud (fan wise). To me it sounded like a helicopter at times [ )] If you're looking for long battery life, don't go with the A70. I didn't even get 2 hours and that was with the laptop in battery save mode and the screen brightness turned up about 1/2 way. The biggest reason why I ended up returning it was because, you guessed it, freezing. It was fine for the first 3 weeks but after that it started freezing up randomly. I have no clue if it was static, like people have claimed it is, but it was just plain annoying.

Looking on the bright side of this laptop: it is very fast, has a great screen, nice keyboard, and I personally like how it looks. And there's now been a recall type thing on the A70 model (and others) on Toshiba's website. If you experience any freezing, Toshiba will replace the laptop.

If you really want to go for it, I'd check out future shop's website for deals regularly. They always have some type of sale going on. I personally didn't completely like the laptop, but keep in mind I'm a very picky person. Good luck!

 

I've had the A70 (3.06/60GB) since August and in comparison to the dozen or so other systems I've used over the years the crashes are very, very minimal.

Perhaps two or three times it has shutdown on its own if I left it on for a few hours with the screen off but it has never crashed while I was using it.

The only problem I've had is related to an IRQ conflict with a USB external soundcard but stuff like that is inevitable with the majority of notebook BIOS.

Battery life is short, true, but if you're looking for a desktop replacement it doesn't really matter. As for the fans....meh....I don't find them terribly loud as long as you're not doing a full system virus scan while you're trying to get to sleep.

I'd certainly be paranoid as all hell given the constant posts on here about the dreaded "static problem" so I'm not sure if I'd buy one; but in my experience it's been fantastic.



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