Do you like your Toshiba?

I can,t understand why its, like this. Never thought that reformat and windows reinstall can be related to laptop brand!!

 

Ever done any computer work? Brand most certainly makes a difference in how easy it is to do something like reformatting it. Like HP/Compaq's tendency to pack all your restoration data on a special hidden partiton. Loose your hard drive and you'll be spending $200+ for a new copy of XP (plus the hard drive). Not to mention what a pain in the butt that hidden partition is to get rid of should you want to. Anyway, enough ranting.

I bought a Satellite A105-2031 a couple days ago, and so far I love it. I was somewhat skeptical of the plain design at first, but after looking at the overly busy HP/Compaq's, it really grew on me. These new Celeron M's are nothing like their predecessors, either. The dark blue lid is cool... it's not black or grey (both way overused in my opinion). Time will tell if it lasts, but if it's anything like my ancient Satellite 1555CDS (which still works perfectly)... well, we'll see.

 

The worse computer work I got was for a Compaq. For some reason they decided to pack the only partition software the bios would allow to run into the same harddrive. You had to set the HDD settings for a particular value and the program would show magically there. Even after formatting the harddrive.

 

I love my Toshiba Satellite M30X

Its great and reaches my needs and it was very cheap only £450

 

I just got a Satellite A105-2031 at Office Depot for $500(after MIR) and I love it.Unfortunatly this model is discontinued but all the A105 series are a good buy.

 

isn't this for safety purposes; eg. when the notebook is drop the "air gaps" will soften the blow?

 

The problem comes from the difficulty in obtaining the custom drivers, etc. that the laptop uses. With Sony Vaios at least, it can often be difficult to download the specific drivers you need if you choose to do a plain old Windows install, rather than reinstall from the custom install discs (or the custom install partition, whatever).

If the manufacturer makes those drivers easily available to download separately, then it becomes much easier to just do a plain fresh install of Windows and then install the drivers yourself. Otherwise, you need to do their custom install of Windows and remove the excess stuff you don't want yourself.

-Zadillo

 

I just got an A100 and it seems great so far.

I started off with an HP dv1635... It was a great machine, I loved the size and the screen and some of its features... but a couple weeks after owning it I realized that the screen was crooked. It was either warped or attached wrong, so I brought it back.

Store was all out of 1635s, so they offered to upgrade me to a 1650 for 100$ more... Wasn't extremely happy (I was mad at myself for spending so much on the 1635 to begin with... student ) but I agreed.

Got the 1650 back home and it had the same problem but WORSE... went back to the store and they opened every 1650 in the store (3) and they all had the same screen problem in various states. The one with the best screen had a horribly misaligned keyboard.

So, they swapped it for a Toshiba A100 with basically the same specs... the only big difference is the Toshiba is 15.4 instead of 14 inch and has the core duo 2050 instead of 2300 (different FSB), but, the Toshiba was 300$ CHEAPER, so I got all that back, and the Toshibas build quality makes the HP look like it was slapped together by monkeys.

I loved the dv1000 design but I couldnt imagine bringing it back and forth to school without it breaking in a month. It was built as bad as a Dell. I don't like the looks of the Toshiba as much, but the build quality is worth the boring design.

 

Angry about my P100-s9012

Its GPU reaches 100 degrees, enough to shut down the computer and injur any user who dares place it on his lap. It also comes with two different brands of network management for the network card, which conflict with each other. Buggy as hell..

but it plays games nicely

 

Well just picked up my P105-S9312 and so far I love it. Have to agree with realitybias on the network management software casuing issues but I disabled the config free software or whatever it is called and everything works great. 7900GS is more than enough for me and is by far adequate enough for gaming.

 

I got an A100-OFH, and i am happy with it so far. I got it for school, which has not yet started, but so far i am very happy with it.

Pros: The utilities included are pretty useful. good power management options, good sound, great screen, the built in memory card reader has proved to be useful, good value.

Cons: Does not seem very "rigid" overall. touchpad could be bigger.

 

I'm configuring a P100 right now - only gripe is the hard drive and RAM. Well, they can all be upgraded aftermarket, but come on, for that price don't I deserve better?

Specs:

Satellite P100-ST7211 - Toshiba Laptop
Intel® Core™ Duo Processor T2400 (1.83GHz; 2MB L2 Cache; 667MHz FSB), Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition, S
unlight Copper, 512MB PC4200 DDR2 533MHz SDRAM (256MBx2),
17" Widescreen SXGA+ TruBrite™ display (1680x1050),
NVIDIA® GeForce™ Go 7600 with 256MB discrete graphics memory,
60GB HDD (5400rpm, Serial-ATA),
DVD SuperMulti drive (+/-R Double Layer),
Intel® PRO/Wireless LAN 3945ABG (802.11a/b/g),
Bluetooth® (v.2.0) + EDR,
Li-Ion Battery (9-Cell),

1713.29 including tax and shipping. Frikkin' tax. Till I see the tax and the CA recycling fee, I'm a happy man. But once that shows, it somehow distorts the whole picture.

 

Just got a P105 and its doing excellent great stylish looks. ^^

 

Just wanted to add that I have gone through well over a dozen Toshiba Satellite A100's of various models (OFH, SK4, and SK8) and will NEVER buy another Toshiba ever again. I hope I have better luck with HP, because the build quality and QC of these Satellites is absolutely pitiful. Support are a bunch of monkey's too. BTW, has ANYONE ever got the recovery CD to boot without actually formatting the drive with XP cd?? After "reading ramdisk" it ALWAYS reboots back to desktop. Support concluded that I had a "defective disk" when in fact it must have been about 10 defective disks since it has occurred with every one! I HATE TOSHIBA! Mostly because of the garbage MatSHITa drives they put in them (no prob with the Pioneer).

 

Had my satellite m100-st5111 for a couple months. Before that I had an 1135-s125, which I gave to my son when he moved out on his own. Both have been excellent, however first thing I do is wipe the drive and install winxp pro myself, load the drivers and apply critical win updates. Disable Internet Explorer and install Firefox. Once I've installed anti-virus (Avast personal is free) and win defender (also free for now as beta), I never have trouble and neither has my son. Both he and I use free wi-fi access sites. Use mine mainly for Office apps, although lately I've been experimenting with Google's new apps like spreadsheet, calendar and other apps on my personalized home page. My son uses his for email and music downloads / storage. Anyway, the Toshibas are working for us.

 

I love my Toshiba, Everyone should get it!

m105-s3064, bought it last Saturday, T2300e 667, 1gb ram 2x512 533, 120gb sata hd, 150GMA embedded video, dvd-ram, wireless/wired/modem, just upgraded to 2gb 2x1gb 667 sticks.

Well, I don't think everyone should get it, but I think it was the best one for me. I'd highly recommend them to anyone who asks.

 

I'm very happy with my Toshiba laptop. It scores 4031 in 3dmark05!

I own a Qosmio F30 (European model), i bought it a few days ago though..

Specs are in the signature

 

I have had pretty good luck with my A105 that I bought this spring -- entry level duo core with Intel GMA integrated graphics, and 1gig mem. Have problems with 'sleep' and the wireless-LAN until I updated the drivers, and lost the screen a couple of times for no reason, so may be a good idea to follow flosfanfool's advice and take control of your laptop with a wipe and basics only. I haven't gone to that extreme yet, but may if I have any more problems.

 

i have a core duo satellite .. its gr8.. only thing missing is.. an AGP dedicated and ofcourse no MS win xp disks, just the recovery disks... disappionting really..

 

I have enjoyed my satellite a105-s361 which I purchased last January. Though this computer is not a duo core model, and has integrated graphics, its still runs smoothly on most applications. For the price at the time; no complaints. However, this is my first laptop, and I am extremely frightened by horror stories pertaining to the Toshiba Customer Service Department, which is apparently
nonexistent. Overall, I am pretty happy, other than the high pitched noise that emits from the CPU/Motherboard during battery mode.

Pentium M 760 (2.0Ghz), 1024 DDR2, 120 GB

 

I just bought an M115-3094 and am content with it. There are some that's that bother me about it though, like the WildTangent ('legal' spyware/adware) program that cannot be removed from the system, and the relatively loud fan that turns on more often than I like. Other than that, I like the notebook.

 

I didn't like my Toshiba until a week ago because it got very hot and loud and even slowed down. Then I bought a notebook cooler for 15 bucks and it's running beautifully now.

 

I love my Toshiba, probably more than I should. I loved my Toshiba before that too!

 

I have had my A100-147 for about a week and am happy with it. It is branded Equium for the Dixons/ Currys group in the UK but is in fact a Satellite A100.

What I like:

The Spec is excellent for the price of £499-99 and includes a 1.6GHz Core Duo with 1GB of RAM and a 60GB SATA Disk. The DVD Multiwriter is a Mat****a which may be problematical. It has 4 USB, 1 Firewire, VGA, TV-Out, Modem, Ethernet, WiFI a & g, 1Cardbus and 1 ExpressCard slot.

The TruBrite Screen is excellent
The Synaptics Touchpad is excellent and the configuration utility gives a lot of options
The Power management utility is excellent
The Intel 945GM chipset graphics are excellent for my purposes
A Restore CD is included
Windows XP Media Centre is pre-loaded
I will get a free upgrade to Vista Premium next year.

What could be better:

The speakers are not the Harmon Kardon's fitted to some models
The Keyboard flexes a bit
The Mat****a DVD Drive could be a problem ... some failures have been reported.
The Case is a bit plasticky ... but then I am used to ThinkPads which are hewn out out of a single piece of rock. However, it is a lot better than the ACER 5102 (which I took back to Comet) which looked and felt as though the base and the lid were designed on different planets!

Would I buy it knowing what I now know about it? YES!

 

Just to add to this after a few months of use. I am still pretty happy with my toshiba. i have gotten to use it plenty.

I have found the battery life to be really poor. The absolute max i was able to get was about 2.5h, displaying a PDF at low screen brightness. That said, i can usually find an outlet to use, when i will be having a long session.

Also, nothing against toshiba, but, i have carried my notebook with me in my backpack a little more than i expected to. i find the machine a little heavy. but, that is just a tradeoff, as a result of choosing a 15.4". I do appreciate the larger screen, especially when playing DVDs.

 

I'm assuming no problems with burning/reading DVD-R's/RW's?

 

M115-S3094
purchased Nov 9th 2006.
1.6 Yonah, 512MB, 80GB
I was not too favorable with Toshiba before last week. My girlfriend has a 3 year old Toshiba Satellite that I really get aggrevated by.
I saw this at Best Buy for $599, plus a $100 reward coupon I had, and could not turn it down.
It's been running great since I spent a night configuring it. Removing junk software and installing mine, etc... It's running very well now. From Hibernate, it gets back to login within just a few seconds.

I plan to use it daily until I purchase a Mobile Quadro Workstation next Fall.

also purchasing some extra memory and possibly upgrading to a merom 2.0 chip, if i can find confirmation somewhere that i'll be able to do it successfully.

 

Ok, more in depth:

I like:

Looks
Performance
256mb x200m
Nicely laid out and accessable ports
Toshiba Power Management
Good speakers
Nice keyboard
Easy to pop a Pentium-M in
Black lid with shiny green Toshiba sticker
Came with 512mb ram in one dimm not 2x256
Proper tasty LG dvd rewriter not a dodgy Matsh!ta one

I don't like:

1024x768 max resolution
No external volume control
It's a bit heavy for a budget end laptop
Nobody else has one!

 

I have not tried reading or burning dvd-r/rws.

 

Well, what are you waiting for!? 8-D

 

Just got my Toshiba Satellite A100-TA9 2 days ago and I love it. It's my second Toshiba laptop and I love it just as much as I did with my first. So far no problems and I hope it stays that way. Ive herd Toshiba warranty horror stories, are they true?

 

I have had positive warranty experiences, but once again horror experiences with the matsh!ta optical drive. I've been searching for an a100 with the pioneer but they all have the matsh!ta. Maybe it's just my sony dvd-rw media, but then again all other drives have no problem with them. Or maybe it's just been bad luck with a couple of the units, since it's the matsh!ta that also wrote to those discs.

 

Yea, i dont burn many cd's or use anything sony so i should be alright.

 

I've had a Satellite A105-S4284 for about a month now. I like it. It's my first notebook so I'm trying not to judge it based on my 'boxen' on upgrades, graphics and the like, but it's really a decent machine.

Only gripe I have is the optical drive. It's a M******* that decided to take a dive on the CD portion of it's operation. It's not a huge deal, but the thing is only just over a month old...you'd think that manufacturers would atleast try to make a product that would last beyond the limited waranty. It really is weak for the thing to dive so quick. Now I'm left with either turning it in for service (3 weeks w/out it) or buying a new drive and putting it in myself.

Kudos to Toshiba, so far, though. I called them, they gave me a case number and said I wouldn't have to pay anything to have the thing replaced....it's really just the inconvenience of it all. I bought the thing so I would have it...not to be without it. Ah well...I'm sure I'll write a rant on how the whole process works on the replacement of the drive if it's not to my satisfaction.

 

have to agree with this. I bought my A100-147 about a month ago and it's great. I love it....

 

I regret getting my QOSMIO F15-210 about a year ago.

Problem:
Replace motherboard after 6 mths (Toshiba told me they have heat related problem)
Fan always run at its max speed thus very noisy (worse than sony and dell)
Can't read memory stick in its so-called multicard reader which Toshiba said it suppose to read MS).
Price is not cheap consider the problem I have.

 

I'm currently using the Satellite 1905-S303 (think that's right) I got slightly over 4 years ago, and it's still a pretty decent computer. Even compared to what's on sale these days, it seems like.

It's had a few problems. It had to be sent off once, they said the memory was replaced. The battery doesn't kick in if it's unplugged, but last time we had a power outage, it kept the computer on just fine. (Go figure?) The optical drive has issues: it doesn't read or burn cd's at all, will usually read dvd's, but can't restart spinning if it stops. And of course it's dusty now so it can overheat with intense work, but it doesn't happen for normal use.

I guess it sounds bad listed like that, but it's lasted longer than my previous laptop (a Sony) and I've been happy enough with it that I just bought another Toshiba Satellite A105-S4364 last week. It's a little early to rate it, but it's working fine so far, and runs The Sims 2 perfectly. I ordered a Kubuntu cd to try on it whenever it arrives, I'd kind of like to dual boot, no idea how that will go.

So I can't say "everyone should get one", but I guess I like them myself. So far.

 

my P100 ST9012

its a heat machine the windows xp stick under the laptop's 7900gtx (under and outside the case of course) has like melted part of the sticker.... I HEHEHE

 

M115 is ok

 

Just got a new toshiba...
Sattelite L35
It's windows vista capable.
but since it has an integrated graphics card thats notdx 10 supported i wont be able to play games soon.
Whitch means i willl have to get a new mother board a new graphics card and some more ramm if i want to play games premium.

 

I love my M115 so far. It does what I need it to do. I bought it for its Media Center capabilities. Its set up (s-video) on top of my 65" tv and has an external usb Hauppage tv tuner W/remote and external Turtle Beach Roadie Soundcard and 5.1 speakers connected to it. Its now my Tivo, dvd and music player.It replaced my bulky desktop MCE setup.

I liked it so much I bought another a week later to use as my portable. Had both almost a month and plan on adding more ram soon.

 

i used to have a P10-EE1 (top of the line, i might say)....i loved that laptop, used it for 2 years, only prob was that the adaptor broke (still worked) and also hard drive failed. The other thing was that it made beeping noise like the battery was low (even while plugged in or 80% battery), and also it typed m,p,3,q whenever it wanted to.....randomly.

After selling that one, i bought a toshiba a100-ta7 (core 2 duo)....seems a bit slower but very much stable than the p10.

the p10 (and also the 15,20,25,35,etc.) had the finest craftsmanship ever....the best looking toshiba ever made. (makes me regret selling it, although it will be "older" technology now.

 

I got my U200 yesterday. My old notebook vas a dell inspiron 9300. I can say that the dell was build better. The toshibas keyboard and LCD cover flexe, but my brother also has a toshiba but he doesn't have this probles. Is the problem that all ultraportables are made more "soft" ?

 

thanks all

 

hated my old toshiba used for 4 months till i had enough of toshiba support then i got an acer they way to go...
it was a A70-dd1
celron d 2.8ghz
ati9000
512mb ram
etc.
it was new when i got is a couple years ago.
i have the following replaced in a short 4 months
4 motherboards two complete failures, (one sound card and the video card)
speaks
lcd screen
heatsink.
i think the only thing that did not break was the hdd, but there was huge incompablity issues. with it too.

hate toshiba now and always will(especailly after support accused me of stealing the computer)

 

I've had my Tecra M2 for 3 years now and it's been rock solid. I have not heard as good a comments regarding the Satellite line; however. I think the Tecra's are a bit hardier considering the primary audience.

The only issue I've had to date with the M2 was when I dropped it and cracked the case. I used it for another year and a half before getting it repaired, which thanks to the extended warranty didn't cost me a dime.

So, quality wise, I'd say it's top notch, I'm just not happy with the specifications on the current batch of Tecra M's and hope they get a major overhaul when the Centrino Pro refresh hits.

Brad Turner
Tecra M2 - PentiumM 1.6, 1GB RAM, 7200RPM HDD

 

I have an A105-S101 and do not like it. I should have bought a Sony or HP.
My biggest problem is that I cannot get a HP PSC 1510 printer to work with
my laptop,although it works great with my old HP desktop.
Wayne

 

I have a M60-BK3 for about 1.5yrs now and still like it. the only problem i encountered was the lcd screen "dim" but was fixed under warranty (less than a year).
then i bought a used dell inspiron e1505 which i thought has a better video card than my toshiba. now, i want to go back on my m60 to play games than my e1505.

 

I have a satellite A20, still using it, and over the past three years of abuse it hasn't let me down once. The hard drive failed a couple of months back and now the lcd is a little loose and wiggly, but I'd definitely buy another one. If it wasn't for the crappy graphics card that has been a bottleneck since I bought this thing, I rate it very highly.

Satellite A20,
P4 2.54 Ghz
100 Gig harddive 5400rpm
1 gig of ram
Pathetic 30 mb GPU