Considering a Custom A130...

Hello:

I am considering the purchase of a custom A130 from the Toshiba Direct site for going off to college next year.

First, some background. I've had my current laptop (A15-S157) for three and a half years now, and I love it. Since I bought it, I've upgraded the hard drive (from 40GB to 80GB), the RAM (from 512MB to 768MB), the wireless card (from Toshiba 802.11b to Intel 2200), and the operating system (from Windows XP Home to Kubuntu Linux). All done myself, mind you.

Anyway, it's becoming pretty out of date at this point, and so I'll be needing something new come summer. And Toshiba's A130 line seems to be about what I want.

This is what I'm considering:

Core 2 Duo (1.66GHz)
Vista Home Basic [I'll hardly be touching it--Kubuntu for the win!]
1GB DDR2 667MHz RAM [I'll buy a second stick of 1GB or, if available by June, 2GB and install myself]
15.4" Non-TruBrite Screen
Intel Integrated Graphics
60GB SATA Hard Drive [I'll buy a WD 160GB and install myself]
DVD±RW
Intel 3945 Wireless
Bluetooth
Harman-Kardon Speakers

Now, my first question is really quite simple. Is there an empty bay in the system for a second hard drive? I know some of the higher end systems have two hard drives, and so I'd assume there's a standard build going on here. I just know that sometimes they leave parts out in situations like those. Anyone have any knowledge here? If it does, I'll bump to an 80GB from Toshiba and install the 160GB (or 200GB if it's available by June) as a second drive. (Operating systems, swap, and VM images on one drive, and my /home folder on the other)

Does the custom build have Gigabit LAN and/or card reader like the pre-built systems do? The Toshiba Direct site says one thing but their PDF spec sheet says something else.

How's (K)ubuntu driver support on this model?

Finally, are there longer-life batteries available for the system? I've read that the battery life on this model is rather poor, so I'd likely want to invest in a different battery if possible. I'm already used to a life of about 2 and a half hours (at best) from my current laptop, but I'm hearing numbers below 2 hours. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

- Trip

 

If you can wait a few days I might be able to answers some of those questions. I ordered a Toshiba A135 custom last week, I think it's the same model.

The only difference on the model I ordered was I chose the 256MB Nvidia card, and no HK speakers.

About the only thing I would change on yours is the Harmon Kardon speakers. Save the money. There really isn't much difference, spend the $30 on a nice pair of headphones.

Oh, and by the way the first thing I'm going to do with mine is resize the HD and install Ubuntu, so I can let you know on the drivers. Gnome FTW
I have a Toshiba 5105-s501. It's almost 5 years old. I've installed everything from Suse 6.0, Red Hat 7.~ to Ubuntu 6.10, and had very good luck, so I'm hoping for decent support on the new laptop.

 

I most certainly can! I'd love to hear your opinion of it.

I'm trying to avoid the Nvidia Binary Blob if I can help it; I'd prefer the piece of mind of the Intel open-source drivers. Granted, the wireless card has closed firmware, but it's more open than anything else on the market.

For about the first two years of my current laptop, I'd have agreed. My speakers on my A15-S157 used to sound just fine. Now they sound very crackly and noisy at any volume that's just above listenable. So I'm not so much concerned about audio quality as longevity.

Haha, I'm a KDE man myself. Again, glad to hear. I'm rather concerned about driver support, particularly with respect to the Bluetooth controller.

Nice. I've had Fedora Core 4 and 5 on this machine, then Kubuntu 6.06 and now Kubuntu 6.10 (first an upgrade, then a clean install due to all the problems with the upgrade). I'll very likely do one final reinstall (for Feisty Fawn--7.04) before I finally retire this machine from its nearly non-stop nearly four-year run.

Then it becomes my sister's.

- Trip

 

I disagree on the Harmon Kardon speakers. I think they have really great sound. But that's just my opinion.

 

I have the HK speakers in my current laptop, and maybe I'll regret not getting them. 90% of the time the speakers on my laptop are off so maybe it's a wash. I asked 2 different sales people when I called Toshiba both said they really couldn't tell the difference.

Anyway my laptop shipped, so I'll see soon.

 

Ok, got the machine today. Vista has a great new feature. Right click on a drive in the disk management page and RESIZE! Perfect now I can keep my default Vista install and play. I booted Ubuntu 6.10 live CD and got an error soft ... cpu!#0 or something. Booted PCLinuxOS live CD no sound....

Did some reading on the error it seems like it has something to do with the power management in the BIOS. I disabled one core of the processor in the bios and was able to boot Ubuntu. I installed it on the new partition. Default resolution 1280x800 was detected. Touchpad worked, sound worked, wireless worked. It is possible that the Realtek card doesn't work. It didn't grab and IP off the network but Realtek has Linux drivers on the site so I'm not to worried.

The install went fine. I was able to update and had Beryl installed and spinning a couple hours after booting the live CD. I'm pretty happy so far. Need to look at the nic, check power management, see if there is a way to get fn key to work, stuff like that but the os is installed an usable.

Oh, after the install I re-enabled both processors and Ubuntu booted fine.

I'll play more and see what else I can learn.

 

Nice! Very nice. How about Bluetooth? Or did you get that in yours? Did you end up needing the Nvidia binary blob?

The Fn key shouldn't be a major issue; I know for me on my older laptop it worked on install... If not, this address may be of help to you. http://fnfx.sf.net

And what about the LAN? Is it Gigabit? Does the system have a card reader? Empty hard drive bay?

Sorry for the tons of questions, I'm really quite curious. ;P

- Trip

 

Well, today I had an orthodontist appointment and my dad came with me. On the way back, he needed to stop at Staples for some paper and while there, we took a detour to the laptop department. I found an A135-4437 and examined it. It feels very light to me next to the cement block that is my current machine. Looking at the bottom, it would appear to have two spaces for hard drives (I'm assuming that's what they were; there were identical panels near the front on either side), but I couldn't exactly take my screwdriver to it and check for a SATA connector in whichever one may be empty.

Any chance you could take a peak and see?

- Trip

 

Sorry, very busy.

I did get bluetooth but I have no bluetooth devices so I didn't attempt to set up or test...

Yes I got the nvidia. I have a HP with the Intel chip at work and beryl will work with it but I'm a gamer. I don't know how much I will use it but I know I would kick myself if I didn't go with nvidia. There is a project I just heard about that has some very good open drivers for nvidia cards but I really don't care. I'm to lazy to be that ethical I totally get the idea behind keeping everything open but I'll live without.

anyway... LAN card is a RealTek RTL8101E, not Gigabit. 1 PCMCIA card slot, one SD card/multi card reader, check the new review of the A135 for all the details.

First thing I did when I got it, sorry I forgot to mention. Flipped it over unscrewed the empty bay on the bottom and there is a SATA connector, now I don't know if there is some special case that the drive is suppose to be in before you put it in there, there didn't seem to be a way to screw the drive in place. I keep meaning to stop by best buy and ask if they know.

The burner works fine with the built in burning application in Nautlis. I'll check again tomorrow to see if you have more questions. I'm pretty happy so far. Biggest negitives for me are the <super> (windows) key placement now that Beryl is using it. You are right about the speakers, get the Harmon Kardons. I have not used the speakers for much but they are not the best.

Everything has worked well so far, the install was easy, updates went fine. (binary blobs and all) I'm going to check in to the function keys and power management stuff, see if there is a way to get suspend working. The fact that I'm interested in getting suspend working after having the laptop for 3 days should say something about how easy it was to set up with Linux.

Almost forgot I have the 1.6Ghz C2D and 1GB Ram, (and the Nvidia card) Gnome with Beryl FLIES! It is so fast, I'm really impressed. Beautiful, smooth, 3D, desktop enviornment, it outshines Vista in nearly every way.

Hope that helps.

 

Does Linux detect the existence of the card at least? I don't know anything about Gnome, but there should be a way to check in a Hardware Manager or something...

I'm not a gamer, haha, so that doesn't matter to me. I'd just like to have the Beryl stuff function, and the Intel will handle that just fine as far as I know.

Thanks so much for this information. Like I said, I read different things in different places... one part of the Toshiba site seemed to imply that the system didn't come with a card reader, while another part implied that it did. I wish there was a way to get Gigabit on it, though it wouldn't be a dealbreaker if I had to do without it...

AWESOME! And yes, I'm pretty sure there is some kind of special case (the name for it slips my mind), though I have no idea where to get one. Just this fact is wonderful!

EDIT: The term in question is "caddy." It came to me just a second ago.

Really? How does Beryl use the Windows key? I tried to use Beryl on this machine once and it seized up because it's too old to handle it, so I'm not familiar with this. In fact, one of the reasons I like Toshiba's keyboard layout is that they put the Windows key out of the way in the top corner.

Glad to hear it went so well! Gives me much hope for my own future.

One final thing that I can think of, it's not terribly important, but do you know how much video RAM it shares? I've seen 224MB and 256MB in different places. I don't think it really makes a difference, just an odd curiosity I have about it.

Thanks so much for your help! I'm now very confident about this system, and look forward to getting my own come summer.

- Trip

 

OK Bluetooth... I don't have a device, and I didn't see anything in the Device Manager that said "Bluetooth" but it looks like it's installed and starting.

~$ dmesg | grep Bl
[17179609.032000] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.8
[17179609.032000] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[17179609.032000] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[17179609.068000] Bluetooth: L2CAP ver 2.8
[17179609.068000] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[17179609.084000] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
[17179609.084000] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized
[17179609.084000] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.7

I'll look more later.

 

Some other things I've found. The media buttons work by default under Ubuntu 6.10, suspend almost works. There is no sound after resume otherwise suspend does work. I bought a MS Wireless notebook mouse, it worked no problems.

 

What do the media buttons do?

- Trip

 

You can change what they do, by default in Gnome they open Firefox, Open RhythmBox, play/pause, stop, forward and back 1 track. Very handy.

Oh and from earlier, the windows key + tab in Beryl pulls up a task switcher similar to the Vista Aero 3d flip.

I would say if you want to run Linux you really can't go wrong with this machine. I am very happy, nearly everything is supported. I haven't tried this yet but it might even be possible to get the finger print reader working.

http://linux.spiney.org/debian_gnu_linux_on_an_ibm_thinkpad_t43p_fingerprint_reader

Good luck with your notebook hunt, at this point I would highly recommend the custom A130/A135.

 

Whoa, whoa, the custom one comes with a fingerprint reader too!?

That was something I did not read in the specs.

This sounds more and more like perfection in laptop form every day.

- Trip

 

Well, it's not perfect. I've had problems getting the burner with Gnomebaker. It will burn a data CD with the basic Nautilus tools but I spent at least an hour and burned about 7 coasters this morning and didn't get the problem resolved.

Also that FNFX software you posted about earlier may not work with this machine. It says it doesn't work with machines with a Phoenix BIOS and that's what the A130 has.

And add no sound after suspend. All minor points, I'm sure there will be a fix for each. Just want to temper your excitement. It's not perfect. However I did just hear an interview with the guy from System76 talking about their build for Linux laptops, and even they have problems.

 

Have you tried installing K3B (and the necessary KDE libraries) and using that? K3B is my preferred burning software.

Ah, okay. So the Fn keys don't work at all?

I remember there being a tool I used a few formats ago that would let you put in any key combination and tell you its code or whatever, and then you could map it however you needed it. I don't remember the tool or anything though. Sorry.

I don't use suspend myself, so that's okay in my book.

- Trip

 

hey, i am looking into buying the custom a130 and i just wanted to ask you guys how the battery life is and if you find that the laptop overheats at all?
and thanks a-ton for all your past posts, they've been very helpful
thanks a-ton
eg

 

I remember now! It was called "xev" and you run it from a console window, though I'm not sure how you'd use the info it provides to fix your Fn problem.

And to help_please, everything I read puts battery life at right about two hours, but you'd be better off waiting for am_dragon to respond as he actually has one.

- Trip

 

Battery life is OK. I am usually some where I can plug in so it's not a huge issue for me. I did take it to work the other day, set it on my desk, connected to someones unsecured wireless I can pickup from my office read some RSS feeds and forgot about it. That was about 8am and at around 9:50am I got my first battery warning. I intended on plugging so I didn't even think to let the battery run down and see how far it would go.

Internet/simple application useage with WiFi and some simple picture browsing/editing with Picasa. At 2 hours and 20 minutes and I got constant warnings that I needed to plug in because I was under 10% battery left.

The function key does not work under Linux by default. I have done zero research on the subject (after reading that FNFX software didn't support the Phoenix bios) and it hasn't bothered me. I've been doing web development, and haven't missed any Fn options. The things that are functions I would like to have are Mute, Brightness, maybe touchpad on/of, but I've not hit the touchpad by accident yet.

Burning issues - still not solved - Here is a thread that discribes the problem.
Ubuntu Forums Thread

 

I'm going to get a custom A130.A little disappointed when heard that the battery lasts for 2hs.Is it a 6-cell battery?

 

The standard battery comes with A130 is a low capacity 6 cell,
mine last about 1.5 hours if play game.
Another gripe I have is that it does NOT have internal mic...

 

Hey all,

I just bought one and I now find myself in a driver dilemma. I got rid of Vista and loaded XP Pro. I now need to find a VGA compatible driver.
Can anyone help?


DP

 

Which graphics chip do you have in your laptop?