Toshiba M5 review (No Pics)

Overview

The M5 series is the new thin and light offering from Toshiba which debuted in early March. It appears the consumer model is the M100. It is available in several customizable options from ToshibaDirect.com The model reviewed is the M5-S433 which has the Intel 1.86 MHZ Duo, a total of 1 Meg memory, 100Gig hard drive at 5400 RPM, 14.1” non-widescreen and non-gloss screen, Nvidia 110 quad video card 128Meg and DVD +- RAM

Reasons for buying

Time to upgrade my Dell 600m which was 3 years old. This is a second work/home machine, or to be more specific I have a primary desktop at work and a primary desktop at home but when I travel for pleasure/work I bring my laptop (about two weekends a month).

Now I own a small business, so the machine is part time work and part time pleasure. I had a few requirements though. It had to be a DUO core. The main reason was the cost savings for a non-duo core was not that great and I’ve been wanting to edit home videos of the kids and I know from my days with my 1.3 Gihz P4M Dell it would take hours and hours to burn a DVD, so I hoped the hype was accurate and it would be considerable faster (it was, more on that later). Thus, it had to have a firewire port. Yes I know what many of you are saying “just get a darn PC card what’s the big deal?” the big deal was I hate buying those, using them, misplacing them (or the kids do) and then spending an hour finding it again. I also wanted a SD card slot, same reasons as above. I also wanted a decent graphics card, this was not a requirement, but I thought it would be nice for video editing or the occasional Battlefield 2 game. One of the main requirements was tt had to have a great keyboard, I do word processing for work and that was key. It had to be less 6 pounds. Finally, I was sort of sold on the idea of a metal case, not sure why…I’ve always had plastic but thought I’d like a metal one.

I did actually purchase 2 others before this one, both of which got returned, which I feel is important to mention as it colors how I view the M5. I had a Dell 710M…which I really thought would be great. But, the white collar (too much like a toy, couldn’t bring it into court), the speed (seemed to crawl along) and finally the keyboard and the ½ size comma and period key were enough for me to send it back to Dell, which much to there credit took it back with NO restocking fee. I then tried also had a Z60T, which was, well nice. I always wanted a think pad they have that mean business look about them I thought and I got a good deal from openstock from CDW, but the keyboard was disappointing, the case was rock solid, but battery life sucked (not to mention the fact the battery stuck out the back over an inch!).

So with that in mind I waited for a month hoping the Dell 620D would be “the machine” as I was a huge Dell fan. It wasn’t, specs didn’t match up with what I wanted so I went with the M5, my first Toshiba. I must confess that I was keen on Toshiba from school days though.

Where and How Purchased

I was watching ToshibaDirect.com daily hoping they would have a 25% off sale like they do for the M100 and other machines, but since this was supposed to be their top of the line business machine I guess they felt like they didn’t need to discount it. So I ordered it from CDW.com, which my firm has an account with. Cost was around $2066 with tax , extra 512 of ram (for a total of 1 gig) and delivery. After it being backordered for 2 weeks they got 90 of them in and shipped it the next day. Got it 3 days later.


Screen.

Now, I’m not a ubertechie, so I don’t really know much about the resolution, except it is as good as the 710M, the z60T and especially my old dell 600m. One annoying thing is that none of those machines had a dead pixel, but this one does have one, just one and it is always green. I don’t know about the return policy, because I finally got it configured how I want it and don’t really want to send it back over the green dot. It’s not that noticeable and I can live with it. Brightness was good, BUT it seemed to be just a tad dull in bright sun (which is very rare). I wish it could up one more “click” so to speak.

There was a bit of light leakage at the bottom, but about the same as my old Dell. So in conclusion, the screen was no better or worse than the other three machines. I should note it is not widescreen and it is matte, which I prefer.

There is no screen flex either twisting or pushing on the back. Which is impressive in my opinion.

Speakers.

For some unknown reason the Dell620 has a mono speaker, that is one speaker, no clue why, but the Toshiba M5 has two speakers on the same level as the keyboard. I like this since when it is on your lap if the speakers are in the front you can’t hear them. The Toshiba speakers are good, can get loud and the kids can watch a DVD with the volume up in the car (a nice side benefit).

There is a nice volume dial, yes you read correctly an actual dial, you don’t see those anymore on MP3 Players or laptops, but is off to the right and seems secure. I hope it doesn’t break but it is SO handy compared to the normal lower or higher switch.

The inputs are on the left side, which is nice too since you can plug your head phones in the side.




PROCESSOR AND PERFORMANCE.

Now keep in mind I’m used to a 600M 1.3 Gig with 768 Ram, but as for speed this thing is AMAZING. I edited an hour of video and the duo core really, really ripped through that in no time. I would guess 4-6X faster than my old dell. I could also surf the web while it was doing it’ video conversion thing, something I couldn’t do with the old Dell. As mentioned the Pi to 2M was 1 Minute 25 Seconds. That seemed a few seconds high to me, but it was bogged down with all the “bloatware” that it ships with. For reference the Dell 600M 1.3 Gig was about 3 minutes.

The video card does do a great job. I don’t know the whole benchmarking thing, and FPS but I don know it plays BF2 very well, better than my desktop which has an older Nvidia 5200 256 Meg. The settings are still on low, but the color is crip, and the 3D effect jumps out at you better than my older Nivida card.

For your normal tasks such a Word or Email or websurfing it does a fine job, as they all do. BUT, one quirky thing, about 2-3 times a day it seems to lockup for about 3-10 seconds, you can still go to the taskbar, but you can’t work on what you were working on, be it email, word, or internet. I think it may be something to do with McAfee..but I don’t know yet.

The WiFi uses something called a diversity antenna. No idea what it is, but it picks up wifi better than my older Dell. Seems very competent there. It does have a hard switch to turn that on and off. Also the Toshiba Utility helps connect very nicely.

As I mentioned the hardrive is a 100 Gig 5400 rpm, which seems pretty mainstream.


HEAT AND NOISE

It is hot. Let me change that one…it’s darn hot. The vent is off to the left of the keyboard and while not hot enough burn me ( I hope) it blows HOT air. The keyboard is warm on each palm rest, and actually the keyboard itself gets a tad warm, not hot though, but enough to notice and if you are outside when it is 76 (as I am today) it’s a tad annoying. The bottom actually stays cool, so I guess it’s a trade off what will get hot. While something to be aware of it’s not a deal breaker by a long shot.

The noise if starting to get to me. I guess you can modify the fan and if it turns on and the speed but to be honest at high speed fan it is louder than I feel it should be. It is a constant buzzing. For the business world, court or classes I think it’s definitely ok. There has been some concern about the dvd/cd player, and it is a little loud, but there is a utility to lower the speed and RPM’s if you want (not sure why you would though).




KEYBOARD, TOUCHPAD AND POINTING STICK.

Ok, first the keyboard is the most solid I’ve used on a laptop...ever. Really it is fantastic no flex on any corner, I love it.

BUT for some reason known only to the boys in Japan who designed it, the layout is different. The windows key is on the left, the home, pgup, pgdwn, and end are aligned vertically on the right side of the keyboard and there is no ctrl on the right side. Finally, just to annoy me when I look at it long enough is that the tab key is normal size while on the opposite side the \ is larger…not sure why they did that. I’ve got to admit that after 50 days the keyboard is beginning to bother me. The layout is different and when you use more than one computer (e.g. desktop and laptop) it throws your for a loop.

The pointer stick probably looks better than the real world application. It is nice, feels good (like sandpaper) and has two buttons underneath the keyboard, integrated very nicely, but I just haven’t gotten the hang of it after a two months. It’s a lot easier for me to slide a thumb down and do quick moves, or for precision to slide my whole hand down. I’ll keep playing with it, and to be very shallow, it does look cool, the blue dot in the middle of the keyboard

The touchpad is not as smooth as my old Dell…go figure after 3 years of heavy use, and I assume the M5 will be smoother after a few months of use. It’s not horrible, but a little different. I did disable the scroll right left/up down function, I kept accidentally triggering it. The buttons on the touchpad are unique. They have a raised line throughout the buttons, I didn’t like it at first, but now have figured out that it nice because when you quick slide your thumb down it rests very nicely on the button. UPDATE after two months, the keypad has gotten smoother.

There are three dedicated buttons...power…the Assist Button and the one button display for presentations you can reassign the assit and one button display if you want to.

FINGERPRINT READER

Ok..sort of a gimmick. I think. I’ve never been a fan of passwords on start up and while I know I should, my philosophy is just to keep physical control of my machine, but with that said the reader is pretty cool. It is fast about 95% accurate and is pretty painless. I am still trying to figure out the password/finger feature, but it appears you can program all your internet passwords to just use your fingerprint. Great idea, but I can’t get it to work like that.

DOCUMENTATION

I’ve never been concerned about manuals or lack of them, but in this case the Toshiba website is terrible, I mean really bad, the FAQ is worthless and the updates are as confusing as heck to see what you are downloading, but as far as the user’s manual. It is hardware specific, nothing about the CONFIGFREE or other Toshiba utilities that are included (like how to use the fingerprint reader). Also the Backup disk (you have to burn 3 DVD’s to get your backup) it doesn’t tell you what to do once they are burned. A little frustrating.

INPUT AND OUTPUT

This is great. Firewire, 3 USB (2 on one side 1 on the other) serial, video, SD card reader headphone, Mic. Firewire works as do the rest, so it’s really all you would expect. It has a PC Card and Express cards slot…no use to me, but looks useful in the future.

The DVD writer is a 8X and DL, which is nice. It reads and writes dvd+ and dvd- as well as RAM. I haven’t tried the RAM portion yet, but I will tell you the +/- is great, I’ve been burning them and it is fast.

Battery life.

The battery does take a very long time to charge I would say 4+ hours to get a full charge. After a two months I’ve realized the battery life sucks. Yes that is a technical term . Yes, that is a technical term. With a full charge, WIFI off, screen setting to the lowest setting, fan on minimal and even the CPU tuned down for batter life I get exactly 2 hours and 2 minutes. God help you if you turn the screen brightness up. I’m very disappointed in this because it was advertised at 3+hours and even with my old Dell I got at least 2 ½ easy. As a note the battery is flush with the back, meaning it doesn’t protrude at all, which is nice (and the IBM didn’t) to have.

As for the charger, the cord is probably 10-12 feet long, BUT, there is no nice way to wrap the cord. The Dell is shaped to hold the cord and wrap it around which seems so intuitive, instead the Dell has a Velcro doohickey hanging of one end and you just wrap the cord…not nearly as nice as the Dell. The AC adapter does get hot, I mean really hot, almost makes me wonder if it is a bad one, it doesn’t really matter as you don’t hold it, but it is hot. It is interesting to complain that you can’t wrap the cord easily around the adaptor, but if you travel a lot it is annoying. Oh, it’s a two prong plug BTW.

BUILD QUALITY AND DESIGN

This is where the machine shines. There is a metal (I guess magnesium? But could be aluminum for all I can tell) lid cover. Which looks a lot like the titanium lid on the Z60T, sort of a silvery metal. The lid is solid, I mean much, much more so than the non-metal lids. The screen has no wobble, the hinges are excellent and as long as you pick it up on anywhere but the left front side there is no creak or wobble. The left front has a sd card slot, below an express card slot, below a pc card slot, so if you grab it there it flex’s a little. But grab it anywhere else and it will be rock solid. As I mentioned the keyboard is fantastic. And event the little bezel around the touchpad is a nice touch which makes you forget it was made in China and you think it might be one of the few made in Japan model( but it was made in China). The only complaint, and it is minor , the firewire port is a bit off center, meaning when you plug in the firewire, it is angled a bit. Absolutely a minor flaw and barely worth mentioning, but it is there.

The lights are interesting. First there is a hidden green caps light on the keyboard. Which is actually pretty silly if you are a touch type and just want to look directly below the keyboard for a light on. The function key, when pressed, has a hidden greenlight pop on below the F10 and above the number 9 on the keyboard. Sort of a nice touch, although I wonder how useful. As for the rest there is a SD card light which comes on when accessing the SD card reader, a power light, on, battery charging light, hardrive , wifi and dvd in use light. They are all little tiny LED’s on the front of the laptop. A tad hard to read and until you figure out what the lights are (they switch to different colors) they are annoying because you have to look down and it takes a few seconds to figure out the layout of them. There is a nice switch to turn off the wifi, very nice to have the actual switch and not the fn +key to do it.

As for size and weight, it says it’s 5.4 pounds, but I think closer to 6 is more accurate. The size is nearly identical to the 600m.

SOFTWARE

Oh my…there is more crappy software loaded then you can shake a stick at. Free trial of MS Office, MS One Note, various other free offers…basically it takes a good hour to start deleting them. For some reason Toshiba likes to come up with it’s own utilities…for everything from battery, to wireless config, to well everything. Really. There are probably 20 Toshiba mini utilities that do..well…who knows what. But if I have the time soon I play with them, maybe at the airport. The only thing it doesn’t have that IBM and Dell do is a setup to automatically tell you what updates to download from Toshiba to download. Some of the “new” drivers are nearly 2 years old (this machine has been out only 4 months!) so that is annoying, as you have to compare the old driver with the ones on the website. One nice piece of software is WinDvD player 2 platinum. Which is a very nice basic DVD editor. Perfect for quickly editing home videos and turning them to DVD’s. This was included free.

Pros
• Business savy design, which looks perfect in the office
• Rock solid build quality with metal lid.
• Dedicated graphics which, while not for gaming, can get you through BF2 looking pretty good.
• Quick performance and amazing processing speed.
• Numerous ports that are laid out well.
• SOLID keyboard.
• 100G hardrive
Cons
• Nonstandard keyboard
• Lots’ of bloatware
• Hot, Hot, Hot (to steal a line from The Cure)
• A bit pricey if you want to customize it from Toshiba Direct ($2,100)
• A couple times a day “locks up” for about 5-10 seconds…could easily be a software setting.

Post Script.
I wrote this in the honeymoon period (one week) and as I update it now two months later I am less fond of the M5. I think for the price $2066 I should have seriously looked at the Sony SZ or saved a few buck and got the HP DV1000t If someone has to ask I’m not sure I would recommend this machine, but at the time it had the specs I was looking for.