New Portege Z830

Go check out a z835 at your local Best Buy/Future Shop. It's readily apparent the screen is designed to flex and have some give-and-take; it does not seem cheap nor a poor design feature. [In my opinion, Toshiba designed the notebook with the consideration people would be lugging it around with them constantly]. Also, the rest of the body/chassis is still metal/magnesium alloy. I do know there was an example where "Apparition" dropped his z830 on a wood floor, and didn't occur any damage.

I think the ASUS Zen has a chrome/metal casing and a very solid feel to it; that may be something worth looking at.

 

I Feel Lonely

The sound of the fan, has withered away. The humming on my palm, while I rest them on the chassis, vibrates no more. Alone in my room, I hear nothing. Nothing. Not the sound of the fan from thy laptop.

This bios update RULES! At first I was scared since when it rebooted, the fan went all bazing and really fast. Then it rebooted again, and my laptop is quiet as ever.

Can I delete C:\t224v160_120? That is the installation folder when I extracted it.

 

Cool. Did the SSD tweaks, and now my WEI is up to 6.7 for the disk drive. Maybe its just a placebo affect, but programs do seem to open a bit faster.

 

good update aint it

yeah old installer files can be removed if the flash was all good!

 

good times i genuinely think it has made a bit of difference

however i have benchmarked the drive with the usual supects and its still as crap as ever according to those benches! lol!

 

I also ran the SSD tweaker. My score was 4.9. After running the SSD Tweaker, my score is now 5.2.

Toshiba Z835 P330 (1st best buy model)
Stock internals, stock RAM stock SSD
Windows 7 Clean installed
Updated with 13 March 2012 Bios
Used the "Auto Tweak Setting" and nothing else.

 

I just unpacked my z830 on Friday. The fan was really loud from just first touching the "on" button. So the first think to do here for everyone is the BIOS update to 1.60 from Tosh web page. It helped immediatelly.

The second think - papers say the machine is equipped with 128GB disk. But when I looked how much free space I have - there is only 69GB. Imagine - you purchase a brand new computer in anno 2012 from a respected manufacturer for almost EUR 800 and you get only 69 GB of storate left for you And nothing helps. Even if you delete all garbage from Toshiba and other teasers, you gain only 1GB. So the second most important think after you update BIOS is CLEAN INSTALL of the system.

The third think - there is 49 drivers for this machine posted on Tosh web. Most of them seem to be garbage. The problem is that I do not know which driver is necessary, which one is usefull and which is nonono.

Can anyone advise? PinoyBoy? Thanks

 

Hi

I have done the bios update to fix the fan noise. However, I now have a question....will it be necessary to re-calibrate the battery to get the additional battery life.

However, getting the battery to run flat is not an easy task because hibernation or standby kicks in at 2%. I have done it before but it took some investigation.

Furthermore, reading through some of the forums I hear it might be dangerous to run the battery flat

Any thoughts?

 

Probably because of the Windows Install and the Recovery Partition; make your Backup Discs and can maybe delete the recovery partition.

Good luck

 

Hey my fellow Z830 owners, it might be off topic, but I was wondering have anyone succeeded to get an on-screen indication for the volume change while using the function key with numbers 3 and 4?

I know it's minor, but it's unfriendly experience to blindly change the volume. Don't you think so?

Also, can someone explains what does the SSD tweak is really doing?

Speaking of the SSD drive, is it possible to replace it myself with a bigger one. I know this might invalidate the warranty but I still like to know if I have the option

Enjoy the amazing machine!

 

AlexUV,

thanks for advise, I am considering doing exactly that thing but there will still be just a system of 30GB. I would gain 20 gb but pure win7 of 30Gb size is too much for me. I want to get rid of that. So i am likely going for a clean install. That is where i have got stuck at present.

 

Badrah,

you are right, the machine looks amazing i have read somewhere that you do not loose waranty when replacing SSD and RAM. And this machine is capable, as i have read, of 16GB ram, which is incredible (intel i3 version) and sata3 ssd, which is almost 5 times quicker than these standard toshiba disks.

 

Aha, on screen indication of volume doesnot work for me as well. I thik they can easily fix this by new driver.

 

Right, AlexUW. Sorry if I wasn't clear in my message. But you read my mind.

 

the toshiba utilities does not include an onscreen volume indicator, they may revise it at some point but currently its common across all tosh laptops that use flashcards to run the Fn key functions

the RAM is maximum of 8Gb and thats only on some portege models with the i7 processor. on most models its maxes at 6Gb as far as i know. no-one has tried to add a 6 or 8Gb module to the unit. but there is only one expansion slot

the SSD is replaceable with any mSATA type aftermarket SSD, but the choices are limited and as far as i am aware there is no market available 256Gb mSATA SSD

as for SATA 3 speeds, there has only been one successful report of getting SATA 3 speeds in this laptop and with only one single SATA 3 drive, that was a runcore T50 drive of 120Gb capacity

no idea on warranty ins and outs, but to get to either RAM or SSD you have to remove the whole bottom of the laptop, easy enough job, but pretty drastic when compared to older laptops

and yes, best plan is fresh install of W7 to clean the system out and free up space. alot of the tosh drivers and utilities are useless, you mainly want the basic system drivers for chipset/network etc etc then i use the flashcards and eco ultility and thats about it tbh.

the SSD tweaker could do anything really, it was a bit of a shot in the dark but i heard some good reviews about it. it will disable a lot of features though like page file and hibernate (another good way to free up disk space!) and also disable some search based services, but SSD's are usually quick enough to cope without the windows searches etc

 

Hey guys, pardon my ignorance, but how do I check what BIOS version is my unit currently running?

 

There is a toshiba application somewhere among All programs in "Start". I do not remenber its name exactly but it somehow relates to HW info. Pr just go to toshiba support page and download the newest BIOS from there in install it. It would let you know if you have the latest one.

 

or check in the.............BIOS ;-)

 

Programs > Toshiba > Tools & Utilities > HWSetup

On the General tab it will tell you the BIOS version.

 

Found it! Thanks!

Looks like I'm running the latest BIOS version 1.60, but I must say the fan noise on mine, when activated (which isn't often, thank god) is really jarring to the point that it was almost giving me a headache. Perhaps cos I'm so sensitive to it after reading all the comments here... I think it's the fact that the sound is not a low-pitched drone or hum, but a rather high-pitched whirring sound that was jarring to my ears....

I'm hanging on to see how it goes i.e. how frequently is the fan activated doing my usual tasks & whether the usual office noise wld drown it out... & pray really hard that i won't hafta do OT too often such that I have to use it in a dead silent office (which was how I 1st noticed the jarring fan noise)

 

Thank you guys for your generous replies and contributions.

I'd love to have an update that brings the on-screen volume indication .. It's minor but really very helpful.

Regarding replacing the SSD, I came across these two links:
Toshiba Portege Z830 / Z835 Teardown (e.g. to upgrade the memory of the Ultrabook) - YouTube
and
Re: Portege Z830-S8302 SSD - Toshiba Forums

I hope you find them helpful.

I have the Core i7 version with 6GB of RAM .. Unfortunately, according to:
http://cdgenp01.csd.toshiba.com/content/product/pdf_files/detailed_specs/portege_Z830-S8302.pdf
The max RAM is 6GB as the on-board RAM module is the 2GB, and the available slot has its maximum already (4GB).

 

This article ( Toshiba Portege Z830 13.3" Ultrabook Laptop Review - Toshiba Creates One Amazing SSD Ultrabook! - The SSD Review) mentions tyat you can use SATA 3 disk in z830. This is goergeous feature for a longevity of the comp.

People commenting below the article mention that despite officially supported only 6gb ram, the computer is likely to work also with bigger modules of RAM

 

thats the only reported case of a sata3 drive working at full sata3 speeds, and only that one sata3 drive make and model as well.

 

Strangely, I have the same experience .. I know the fan was working before I update and now it works a lot less. But once I updated, the sound is much louder than before!

I began to wonder whether I can change some settings in the BIOS setup that might help control that.

 

Just a shot in the dark, but have any of you tried using speedfan (or something similar..)?

 

Hello everyone,i just bought mine few days ago,i have question regarding the temperature.i re paste mine using gelid,but why i found that the temperature still high? here my spec

icore 5
6gb memory

cpu load 65 Celcius (especialy watching you tube)
cpu idle 50-55 Celcius

is that normal?can you guys tell me your temp on idle and load?

Thank You

 

Hi guys,

I have the Z835-P370 which is the i5 model with 6GB of RAM. I am loving it so far. I have the latest BIOS (came that way) and my fan has never turned on.

Has anyone addressed the incredibly slow (at least on paper) SSD? Is it worth upgrading the SSD to another 128GB model or wait for the 256GB ones to come out? It really bothers me that other mSATA drives are seemingly 10x as fast.

 

Fan noise is much less witth the newest BIOS although, it was next to non-existent once upon a time with the original. I have been through every mSATA SSD available and the only that I could ORIG get to work at SATA 3 was the Runcore T50. I have had conversations with both Runcore and Toshiba regarding this and, although it was generally conceded that getting SATA 3 to work properly was possible through a software moderation, it would be sometime this year that Toshiba flips the switch as there is a great deal of validation testing that goes along with that. I have not been able to replicate the original SATA 3 experience since removing and reinstalling for further testing with other mSATA SSDs.

 

Does anyone know if the interface for the panel is display port or dvi? Cablecard doesn't work over display port yet.

 

anyone can help?

 

I don't know what "ORIG get to work" means. I am not talking about using a SATA3 drive. I was asking if there's a way to upgrade to a larger or alternate SATA2 drive, because it seems like the model Toshiba uses in the Z830 gets the lowest scores of all SSD drives.

 

i cant seem to get the eco charge mode to work for battery manager

its selected and ive done what they instructions say but it still charges to 100%

any tips?

 

@TBo45:

Did you let it get below 80%?

 

Apologies....I meant priginally, SATA 3 performed great when testing then later...not. Yes the SSD is comparable to the Sandisk u100 and the two are probably bottom of the barrel for performance. You could easily upgrade to any mSATA SSD.

 

yes i did.

 

Anyone try replacing a 8GB RAM module in it?

 

it work on i3 model 10gb RAM total info from Russian forum

 

Are there any issues with the wireless card? I am sitting in my living room where I use my other laptop, tablet, and phone daily and I am getting terrible performance with the Z835. I can barely load websites. Pinging yahoo.com times out, etc.

 

Is there a particular brand or model you'd recommend?

 

Still loving my z830. Last night, my 23-year-old son came home with a MacBook Air. He was really proud of his purchase and he picked up his MacBook Air in one hand and my z830 in the other. The look on his face was somewhat startling, as he realized that the z830 actually felt lighter and more nimble. It was a defining moment.

At the annual board retreat for the non-profit I lead (just wrapped it up), board members would walk up to me and ask if I had this document or that. I had my z830 with me at all times throughout the weekend. Standing, I'd just open it up and balance it in one hand while exploring for the document in the other. While they watched, I'd queue up an email and send them the document on the spot, then look back and say, "Done." They were inevitably startled. "Wow -- you continue to surprise me," they'd rattle. But it was the z830 that was surprising.

Prior to the retreat, our I.T. guy asked me which connection I needed for the data projector in the room where the board was planning to meet. I pretty much replied that it didn't matter (the z830 is ready with either an HDMI or standard VGA -- without the need for any adaptor or dongle). In nearly an instant, I could unfold the z830, plug in either cable, and it would just WORK. Using the hardware-based push button connector to switch from the built-in screen, over to a projector, or both, it's flawless -- like no Windows rig I've ever seen. Never stutters when connecting, never malfunctions with the resolution. It just WORKS.

I just hope someone from Toshiba will someday see my post. Because -- I don't know whom to thank personally. I only know -- I'm lovin' my z830.

Doug

 

Has anyone tried replacing their hard drive with this?
Samsung Introduces 256GB mSATA PM830 SATA 3 SSD as Highest Capacity mSATA SSD To Date - The SSD Review

 

I agree... other than my stuck pixel and lack of BT... I really like this machine.

I hope Toshiba updates their 2012 version with a Full HD screen and then I'm done.

 

I kinda hope they change the keyboard on a future model. The current keyboard is kinda funky (in my opinion).

 

Sygyzy,

Just try rebooting your router. Mine z830 did not have any wifi reception problems.

 

Doug, hehehe, i have just recently experienced the identical story with my younger sister. But to be honest, Airs have much better touchpad

Kocur

 

Yes I have that SSD in at the moment... at least I think I haven't switched it out again... Doesn't work SATA 3 but does have the space. I have been in touch a few times with Toshiba re: SATA 3...no update yet!

 

Has anyone put a single 8gb stick of RAM into an i7-equipped Portege? I just picked one up yesterday (with the standard 4gb installed) and was wondering if it will at least recognize the max 8gb as stated by Intel?

 

Kocur, I guess it's a personal thing, but I MUCH prefer real buttons.

 

So, Apparition, how would the speed of the replacement SSD compare to the speed of the original factory-installed SSD? Would I be able to feel any kind of real improvement -- in the real tangible world?

 

the tweeks i did to raise my tosh drive from WEI 5.9 to 6.7 made a massive difference, drive felt much much snappier and much more in the realms of responsivness of my OCZ drive in my R700.

as such i reckon a proper swap out for a decent SATA2 drive would feel even better (my OCZ returns a 7.3)