Are Toshiba Satellite Laptops worth Buying or are they Defective?

Hi everyone,
I am in a desperate need of a laptop right now because I don't have a computer at the moment and I have a dozen of school-work to complete before holidays. So I was looking for something used and affordable (I can't pay more than $85), not one of those "beasts" that are made for gaming, etc. I want it for surfing the net, having decent stats and running relatively fast, also it would be great if it could support Windows 7 if I did a maximum upgrade to it.
However, I was aiming at the Toshiba Satellite, since they are cheap on eBay, but a friend of mine really put me off by saying that those are the most defective laptops, he knows a lot of people that have had problems with them, etc etc. Is it true? I want to get one of the A or M series. I've found great deals.
Could someone please clarify things up for me? Have you had any experience with these laptops, are they any durable and good or not?
Please let me know, I'd be very grateful.
Thanks!

 

Toshiba as a brand are generally pretty reliable.

PCWorld survey put them as 3rd in reliability after Apple and Samsung. Also, an older, but still often cited statistic in 2009 puts them in second place for reliability after ASUS.

Of course, individual models are more important than total brand rankings. Generally, more premium models are more reliable than low end stuff. This is true for pretty much every brand.

 

Satellites are very great bang for buck-but if you want something reliable, you'll have to opt for a lower-end one with a Celeron/Core i3, and integrated graphics. My friends and I have all had Satellite laptops with the ATI graphics or beefy first-gen i7s, and had issues with overheating and dust in the fan. Our parents who bought Celeron units with Intel GMA 950/3150, I've almost never had to touch. Because they run cooler, and consume less power, they're less prone to common issues that laptops have later in their life cycle. However-it is still important to dust out your machine after a few months.

Satellites will still feel cheap to the touch and will not be rugged, solid laptops, this is the same for all budget machines. So don't expect it to survive a drop to the ground, or if it's left out in the cold... etc.

 

This is my first time posting on this forum (I'm new to the site) but I thought I would give my 2 cents worth. I bought my wife her first laptop in 2009. It was a Toshiba Satellite system from Wal-Mart. I don't have the system readily available so I can't give the model number right now. But the system was AMD-based with ATi graphics, 2 GB of RAM and a decent hard drive (250 GB SATA 7200 RPM...which is fast considering). The system is currently in pieces due to a broken hinge on the right side. I'm not exactly sure what caused it since the laptop was never dropped or abused. If it wasn't in my wife's lap it was put away on a shelf out of harms way. The system still works though.

Recently, I won a Toshiba Satellite (see my profile for notebooks owned) from ShopGoodwill that was their 2008 gaming model. Most reviews say that this particular system was built with out-dated parts. As out-dated as they are, this system was restored and appears to be a very good notebook. It has issues with playing Facebook games but when it comes to commercial games it plays them without a hitch. Some of the newer games have not worked so well and this is to be expected considering the time differences but it runs my Adobe CS 5.5 for college without problems.

Both systems are very solid computers and Toshiba uses a heavier shell that doesn't feel flimsy like most others. I still have an Acer that is as old as the second Toshiba. No matter how well I took care of it, the Acer slowly started having faults that were beyond repair (touchpad died, left button clicked without actually clicking it, etc.). I highly recommend Toshiba and I would advise that an extended warranty of some kind be thought about. Most systems made to day no matter what brand is on them generally do well to last a year. And there will always be the possibility for manufacturing defects that might not show up until the original warranty wears off so do yourself a favor and get the extended warranty to protect your investment. Toshiba, in my experience, is the next best computer to an Apple.

 

Acers by my experience are horrendously unreliable and generally designed terribly. All the Thinkpadders I know always complain about the Acer-built Thinkpads as well, for being unreliable. My friend bought a high-end Acer Aspire laptop for college, and he's already started having problems with it. My Toshiba Qosmio(aside from the temperature issues) trundles on no problem.

The X205-S9810(your second Satellite) looks like a pretty good spec laptop. Yes, the NVIDIA 8700M in it is kinda old, but it's a midrange graphics processor, it's very good for pretty much all mid-level gaming. The T5750 in it though is also a bit outdated... my old Toshiba A305-S6916 laptop, which is about the same age as that laptop, maybe slightly older... has a T6400, a Penryn Core 2 Duo, which is far more up to date(for the time). That laptop is still very good though.

 

Their customer service is not very reliable or helpful at all. As a matter of fact, the Acer I had (Aspire 5515) was part of a lawsuit against Acer because they blocked all the Windows utilities to restore a system. It also would not work with any other hard drive other than the one it came with. I won and received a 8 GB flash drive from them after 6 months of waiting.

As a gift for Christmas last year I thought I would get my wife a new laptop to replace the broken Toshiba (at least until we could get it fixed). She picked a 17" Acer Aspire (model number I can't remember). We had nothing but trouble from day one. The system kept turning itself off while it was in use as if someone pressed the power button or the battery was dead. We returned it for another identical computer only to have the same issue. Needless to say, she went back to her Toshiba with the broken hinge which is still going strong.

The second Toshiba gets a Windows Performance Index of 5.1, which is a huge improvement for me since I've not had a notebook exceed 3.5 before. I need to find a benchmark application to fully test the system because I am curious of what it would have to say about this system.

 

I bought a higher-end i7 Toshiba laptop and at around the 1-year mark, several problems appeared, and each time, it has been quite a wait for parts. Even though I really like the laptop, it has cost me a lot of productivity with weeks sitting in the repair shop with each of the problems. So I think I might go with an Asus next time I buy a laptop.

 

ASUS makes decent laptops. I'm not sure about their entry-level or basic machines, I generally think Toshiba does the best job with those. But I've worked on my friend's G-series ASUS ROG, a gaming laptop, and it was a pretty neatly designed laptop.

Toshiba tends to make a bit of a hash of their Qosmio line... I've heard mixed stories from them on that. They do okay most of the time though. However-I wouldn't recommend picking up a secondhand Qosmio. The business-class Toshibas are supposedly super-reliable, but less featured than other business-class hardware from other makers(Lenovo in particular).

Depending on which Toshiba you bought, I strongly recommend on the higher-spec ones(or pretty much any high-spec machine) you should get a good warranty. 2 years at the very least, if you're not very knowledgeable with new hardware. I work on friend's newer laptops all the time, so I'm more than capable of keeping mine in check. And my i7-2670QM Qosmio has only needed one fan dusting... other than that, it's working beautifully.