Just got the new R835-P50X

Indeed it is new and these types of problems may take a while to show, so I guess we will wait - I can do the research but you mentioned the R700(?) series as a possible reference example. Were there heat problems with that series? Was it constructed with alum parts in the heatsink?

And you are right, after taxes the purchase amounts to about $700 which if you can qualify with a .edu email makes the xbox deal interesting (to keep or ebay).

I note that Best Buy is selling the R835-P70 which has WiMax but I've read that it might address the cooling issues too. This is from one post on Amazon's feedback so not the best source with only one comment on the cooling issue. My experience with large corporate responses to this type of problem would lead me to believe that no changes have been made to the cooling system.

 

I've had a r835-p70 for about a month now. I'm able to play games for hours with the lid closed without any overheating issues. It gets hot sure, but not enough to cause problems.

 

So it's been confirmed that the R835 has SATA III disabled by BIOS.

What's the possibility of them releasing a patch / fix or are SATA III SSDs forever limited to SATA II speeds?

 

The R700, I believe ran hotter, possibly due to the older processor, or cooling design, I don't know. FWIW, I did not own the R700 or this R800 yet. I was researching like many others for an extremely lightweight portable notebook WITH an optical drive and found the R700 and R800 series.

If you want to look at the past reviews/comments on the R700, there is a large thread over here on this forum. Also there is an official Toshiba notebook forum, plus you can search for more R700 postings if you like from other reviews/comments from online stores and review sites.

About the one comment over at Amazon. Until we hear others confirm the copper heat sink or see actual pics and videos, I wouldn't take that "review" too seriously. The poster stated..."They also just released a new model, R835-P70, that most likely resolved the issue." I need further proof before buying into that.

 

The way I read the post from Jim over at the Toshiba forum was unless Toshiba replaces the SATA II drive inside with a SATA III drive in the future on this model, they will most likely NOT update the BIOS.

I don't think Toshiba is going to have a firmware update w/o an introduction of a SATA III drive in the R835. Looks like Toshiba is being honest here. They did not pull our legs and say it's something they will look into and deceive us, dragging out the answer for months to a year. I know many don't like the answer but at least, there are no "promises".

Now, can there be a hack from a third party that enables SATA III? That is certainly a possibility but maybe even that is slim.

 

Just got the R835-p56x and liking it so far. The LCD seems a little grainy at times but i can live with it. The thing that bothers me is that the laptop battery takes almost 3 hours to charge. I am using the official bundled charger and the laptop has the 6 cell 66whr battery. Is this normal charging time. All my other laptops (mostly dell) seem to charge the batteries much faster

Also can any one of you recommend a good usb 3.0 hub? I'd like to extend the lone Usb 3.0 port as i have two external portable 1tb hard drives

 

Mine takes about 3 hours to charge as well. Most of my previous HP laptops had a fast charge mode that would fast charge the battery to 90% very quickly. Evidently this Toshiba doesn't have anything like that.

 

Thanks for confirming that. Now i know it's not just my laptop. Any insight on usb 3.0 hubs? The reviews on amazon and newegg are quite scary

 

I bought a R835-P55X a few weeks ago from Microsoft store. So far, it's been working great, and I think Toshiba has produced a winner here (given the relatively low price tag compared to other brands).

Regarding the heat sink, I can confirm that P55X also has an aluminum one. The thing is after seeing lots of complaints and concern about this aluminum heatsink in this thread, I wonder if I should be worried about this as well. But so far it's been running pretty cool, with core temps at around 45c-50c when websurfing and typing word documents.

There are 2 things that bother me a bit though. First is that the spacebar is starting to squeak when pressed after a week or two. Other buttons are great, it's just the right side of the space bar that occasionally makes squeaky noise. Does anybody have this problem too? Or maybe my keyboard is defective.

The second is the graininess on the screen. I can frequently see faint vertical patterns on the screen. I'm positive that it's caused by the border of the pixels, but I'm not sure why it appears vertical and more visible than other screens I've seen. It's also more visible with very light-colored backgrounds. I'm not sure if this called screen door effect? Do you also notice this effect on your screen?

Any comments or response would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

 

Any ideas on the best enclosure for the internal 640GB HDD after I've replaced with an SSD? I am keen to get the max speed possible when connecting this drive externally (which means USB 3.0 rather than eSATA) and would like to hear if anyone has a recommendation for enclosure.

 

I can confirm I have the same squeaky-spacebar issue on my few-weeks-old P55X.

Yup, although it's generally subtle, and the verticals and horizontals are the same for me. It looks a bit like the below photo from this review of the Vaio S:



But not nearly as bad as that photo makes it look.

 

I don't see this at all with mine...although that could be because my vision isn't very good.

 

Other comments, and issues I've encountered/solved:

- The keyboard and mouse buttons are crazy fingerprint magnets. This is more evident in person than in the photos.

- Webcam image quality is pretty awful. Is the native res 320x240 or something?

- Sound quality's actually perfectly fine. I was expecting much, much worse given all the reviews on this.

- The "Microsoft Signature" power settings on the P55X got alot of the timings backward for Plugged-In versus On-Battery. (i.e., it would take *longer* to go to sleep while on battery, etc.) I manually corrected these in the detailed settings.

- The lid triggers sleep at a relatively high angle (30 degrees?). It's easy to trigger it accidentally while removing the battery.

- On that note, the battery tends to get caught easily while sliding in/out unless you push/pull it perfectly straight. It's a bit mysterious, since the rail design doesn't look that different from my old Sony's, but the latter never gave me trouble.

- Similarly, the USB ports are also tight unless you push the plug in perfectly straight.

- Possibly due to my adjusting the main partition, the Intel Rapid Storage Technology driver for AHCI (ver 10.0.1.1008) would sometimes get stuck at 25% CPU and prevent shutdown. (This shows up only as "NT Kernel & System" in the Task Manager; it was a pain tracking down the problem to iaStor.sys). This was solved by switching to Microsoft's default AHCI driver, Msahci.sys, using Device Manager to find matching drivers on the machine. (Step-by-step here)

 

Does any one know what the small pinhole on the right palmrest underneath the sd card is? Is it the mic or something else?
Thanks!

 

The MS Store people said it was a microphone, so I guess so.

 

I am finding that when using the computer whilst plugged in, I am getting mild electric shocks from the front right hand corner. Does anyone else experience this

 

Does the PSU have a 2 or 3 pin plug (ie is there an earth connection)? Unearthed PSUs are more likely to have a floating voltage but you can also get this from other connected equipment. The floating voltage is more noticeable if you are barefoot on a concrete floor.

John

 

My girlfriend just got the p56x and has this pixelation issue as well. Really strange.

 

Hi all!

Does anyone know how to remove a keyboard on the R835-P50X?

I accidentally spilled Mango Ice Tea W/Raspberry (very good at Caribou btw), all over the right side of my keyboard. I then removed the keys one by one to clean the keys and the plastic holders. Now a couple of my keys are .... weird.. and won't come back up or making a loud clicking noise when pressed.

I ordered a new keyboard from nationalparts.com which will arrive next week. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to remove the entire keyboard without unscrewing the bottom of the laptop. I was able to do it on a Acer TimelineX 13.3, but this one seems more tightly held.

Anyone please help. Thanks!

Rytt

 

This is probably not possible but thought id give it a shot.

Since we can replace the CD/DVD drive with an HD Caddi, does the mobo support some sort of raid config?

 

Hi All,
I am having problem with the battery power being drained when it is in completely turned off , shutdown. I dont use sleep or hypernation. I have almost anything you can imagine to disable and turn off, including sleep charge, all the wakeups, dvd drive, lan, wifi, and it still drains the power roughly 10% overnight. Any help will be much appreciated.

Thanks,
TT

 

Where did you buy yours? I haven't heard of the draining since I began following the R835.

 

I bought it locally in the store. I don't want to sound like the store's problem. It is toshiba's problem. It is strange that i am the only one with this problem. If it was a draw of the luck out of a million, then I have to live with that.

 

Do you have "Panel Open - Power On" enabled? (I have this setting disabled, but apparently it can't be disabled for sleep/hibernate; only for complete shutdowns. If it is enabled, I suspect it draws a bit of power, since swapping the battery while in hibernation keeps it from waking when I next open the lid.)

 

"Panel Open-Power On" has been disabled. Thank you.

 

Could you please share how you disabled that Panel Open-Power on?

Mr. Mysterious

 

I had it disabled before and that didn't fix the battery losing charge issue.

Go to Control Panel, Power Options, and you should see it on the lower left.

 

Ah, there it is. Thank you!

+rep.

Mr. Mysterious

 

tishatossie, you still have the draining issue?

 

Also disable features such as Wake on LAN and Sleep 'n Charge which use power to monitor what is happening when the computer is off.

John

 

Yes, I am still having the battery losing power issue.

I had all the wakeup options disabled and disabled sleep charge, I checked that usb port and it does not have power to a portable device when the laptop is off. LAN is disabled, as well legacy usb. I went through the bios every screen and disable anything that is suspicious. HWSetup is basically the same as the bios options. I disabled the DVD, but strangely it still has power to eject when the machine is on. my other laptop, if dvd was disabled, it can't be ejected and has no power to it when the machine is on. But that is not the real issue.

The issue is, what is drawing the power when the machine is completely shut down (turned off)?

 

Can anyone please comment on the Intel HD graphics on this laptop?
At the very least, how does it fare in 720p/1080p video playback? How about video playback on a HDTV via a hdmi cable?

 

there is a new bios update available> Version 3.00 - 2011-08-11

Version: 3.00
Size: 5,822,844 bytes
Posted: 08/11/11
Released Date: 08/11/11
Applicable Categories: BIOS

Change History

http://www.csd.toshiba.com/cgi-bin/tais/support/jsp/modelContent.jsp?modelFilter=&rpn=PT324U&category=&selCategory=2756709&moid=2962994&os=&ct=DL&selFamily=1073768662

Version 3.00 - 2011-08-11
Improved thermal control.
Improved Hot Undock control in Windows XP.
Improved a power-off issue.
Improved an issue where the screen may flicker until the OS starts while resuming from hibernation on external GPU models.
Improved stability when resuming from hibernation on external GPU models.
Version 2.80 - 2011-06-30
Added support for the VRAM Samsung 1GBit G-die.
Implemented the INTEL specification for the Intel 6 Series Chipset (Cougar Point) to improve stability.

 

It plays 1080P without a hiccup. HDMI works and is auto detected. The previous issue I had with the HDMI was that I used it with an old monitor that had DVI ports and I used a DVI-HDMI cable which the Portege would not output to but other laptops would.

 

Thanks for the reply. I have plans to connect this to a hdtv sometimes. Was considering the Acer TimelineX 3830 with the nvidia graphics.

 

Other thing is to make sure ECO mode is not ON when doing 720/1080P content. When Eco mode is ON, I feel the laptop operates very sluggishly with 720P/1080P (which is logical since it's trying to conserve battery by throttling the CPU).

 

thanks a lot

 

any one else notice after this firmware update it seems the cpu is throttled down untill you call for it and then it takes forever to "spin Up" as it where..

i saw a imedite temp drop but i think there something funny there to. showed a lower temp than should...IMPO

also it does seem laggy at times now like it is doing a poor job at throttling without lag.

 

Insain,
i can output to all three, with no issues as far as jittery. but im also using Momentus® XT Solid State Hybrid Drive ST95005620AS so it can deliver..
but i do say it gets TOASTY THEN> but if there thermal was better it would be bad to leave it like this.....
hdmi 1080 1080 content Video
VGA 720 1400x900 1080 content Video
Internal LCD 1080 content Video

 

I would run HWiNFO32 and enable the sensors then try different loading patterns to see if it confirms your perception about the CPU slowing down. You can also run a benchmark such as wPrime to see if the results are in the expected range for the CPU.

John

 

just did some this AM, something is wrong...IE they are throttling to prevent the temps from doing what i said they would do ..
Toshiba R835-p50X bios 3.0 something wrong - YouTube

i can go to my 4620 start prime and use cpuid cpu-z and watch my cpu go 100% as soon as it starts and drops live when i stop it. but the r835 cant get to 2.1 even with all the below running something really funny IE BAD For US>

Toshiba R835-p50x Bios 3.0 Not 2.1ghz throttled.
2, 480 movies, Prime number Generator (SUPER HIGH CPU LOAD), Uploading a 1080P HD Youtub video and recording witha HD lifecam webcam from the toshiba.
should be showing 2.1 not 1.49

 

The most interesting evidence in your screen capture is the Intel Processor Identification Utility reporting that the system bus is running at 50 MHz.

Did the bus get throttled with the previous BIOS or did only the CPU slow down when it got a bit warm?

John

 

i never checked with these apps before the update wish i did. any one that hasn't updated run the apps i did.. to check for us..

couldn't answer 2nd part due to above...

 

when this started i was more concerned about thermal mngmnt. over cpu being cut.. until i realized they was throttling this thing In my opinion at least...

 

I just checked the vid i put up the bus multi was 99.8 for one of the screen shots while the cpu stayed at 1.49 toshiba..

 

I went to Best Buy today to see if I could see this laptop in person before I pulled the trigger but they don't carry it in store anymore. I tried other places locally and at best other retailers only offer an online option for purchase. Anyone know why this is and if there are any B&M stores that still carry this laptop?

 

Could be that Toshiba could be coming out with a hardware refresh (same model but with slightly different hardware); and thus just waiting for the current stock and inventory of stores to deplete [this is typical for Toshiba as they pre-make almost all their laptops].

I know the porteges were selling at Best Buy like hot cakes.

 

best buy stopped selling the p50x and is now selling the p70 but not the p70x
the x is suposed to designate its not part of the intell recall from the defective chips.. (dunno if new p70 is an x without saying it)

after this whole mess started toshiba pulled the p50x from BB and released the p70 im sure there playing the model number game to keep the class actions harder to file.. but they dont relize the entire line is subject to this not a model..

 

I'm hoping that's the case. I'll hold out for the newer hardware.

 

i wouldn't expect it to be any better. untill settle or court you wont see a Thermal Change for the better.. unless they grow a conscious wich i doubt..

buy it get the warranty and let them eat the loss..

also the throtling is a huge problem. LIKE HUGE>> my 4 Yr old notebook is benching right behind it. LMFAO>> and it was 299 acer 4620z