Couple of questions.

Ok, I have a Toshiba Satellite A205-S5812 and have a few questions.

My first question is... There are little tiny boxes at the top of the screen (you can barely see them but they are their) and when you scroll over them, they slide down and have all these options. Is there a way to get rid of this or turn it off? It is kind of annoying me aha.

Second question. I have a 160 GB hard drive but it says I only have 130 GB free of 147 GB. Keep in mind that this is a brand new laptop. I havent done anything with it yet except uninstall all the preinstalled crap and install Microsoft Office Home and Student & CCleaner. If anybody can explain why this is/how I can raise my GB a few, that would be awesome. Thanks!

 

Not sure about the first part of your question, but I'll give the second half a shot.

HDD manufacturers "fudge" the numbers on the HDDs they sell. A "160gb" hdd will only have 147gb that is usable because of the difference between 1000^3 and 1024^3. You are losing even more space because Toshiba has a recovery partition on the drive.

You can increase the space by deleting the recovery partition but make SURE you make your backup disks before hand. You will not be able to get more space than 147gb.

 

Also, my battery life is only around two hours at 100%... Is that normal?

 

Probable is if you playing intense games.

 

One last question. The person who gave me this laptop apparently didnt charge it fully before using it. You only get 2 hours of battery life on 100% and I read somewhere I should get around 7 hours... Is there a way to like do something with the battery to be able to recharge it or something to get the full 7 hours?

 

I just got this laptop back and I havent played a single game on it. Not even on addictinggames aha.

 

The A205 was released in early 2007, assuming your friend got it about that time it means the battery is about 18 months old. If the battery was abused (allowed to get too hot), or has gone through many charge/discharge cycles the performance may have degraded to the point that you are seeing now. Also, 7 hours may be assuming that extreme power management settings are in place like throttling down the CPU, decreasing the screen backlight, and turning off RF trancievers (wifi/bluetooth).

 

From your description it sounds these objects may be your function key display boxes, and you may have the "function sticky keys" preference enabled.

Try pressing the function [FN] key (next to the CTRL key in the lower LH corner) twice, and they should recede.

You can find and disable the sticky key preferences and options as follows (where they may be disabled or re-config'ed) -

Type "Toshiba" in Vista's "start/search" window, then:

Toshiba Assist/Optimize/FN Accessibility/UseFNStickyKeys <--- untick this last item and click "Apply".

Or, keep them enabled, but play around with the preferences to suit yourself. Even when the FN sticky keys are disabled you can still invoke the Toshiba specific FN functions by holding down the FN key while simultaneously pressing the appropriate KB function keys (along the top row of the KB).

I personally really like the FN key GUI displays and use them often, but do not have them stickied. I prefer to invioke them manually with the FN key as required. Pressing the FN key is a handy visual reminder of the available functions, since I can't always remember them all (for example FN + ESC = quick and handy way to mute/unmute with visual feedback).

HTH