X505-Q865 brief hands on ...

1st of all this is not my laptop , I am buying for a friend , then taking it back to him when I go back on the trip to China . So this is all my takes on it @ about 2 hr period.

So pictures are worth 1000000000000 words . here we go .




























So here are the cons and pros
Pros : Beautiful finish , all piano black finish , but that also means finger prints ....
Price is right . With an I5-430M +GT 360 + 500G + 4G DDR3 . You can't really get any better.
Good layout of the keyboard . It does have a lot of space (well you do have 18.4" space.)
left side media key (some people might not like it , but I find it useful sometimes ).
Cooling is not that bad , both fans under the hood work really well(if they have the space under them) .
Lights- When you turn it on , it does look really good.

cons
weigh - I had W90VP , and this thing feels almost heavier than my W90(or maybe just me start to get use to my 14" X83) . But anyway with a 18.4" screen , this is excepted.
No HD Screen - I guess for the price .... the max this thing gets is 1680X945
Heat - This thing do generate a lot of heat and worse part is the fans suck from below and blows out from the rear instead of suck from the sides ...which means you better find a really really good heat sink for it.


Final word - upon the 2 hr test drive , it doesn't really impress me that much , the 3DV score is kinda low with GT 360M ( could be the standard driver issue). And under normal use it feels a little bit laggy , you can feel it when you click the mouse left click ( like half a sec delay or so ). I guess it could because the I5 is not running @ full speed when idle. Also there is an annoying but good feature toshiba put in there , I forgot what it was called but it's whenever you move the laptop the computer automatically puts the HDD spin head back its original position (which stops read/write ) so that means whatever you were doing it will stop. This feature was quite annoying when I was doing the 3DV while trying to move it to a better place for heat dispensing. On the heat part , it was sitting @ my bed for about 10 mins running 3DV , it just made everything really warm around it , I am sure that if you put it on your lap while it's running on full power , it may not burn you but will make you feel really uncomfortable.
For the price this is a good buy @ bestbuy , it's 1099, with shipping and tax everything came out around 1166 (Ship to Hawaii). Was eyeing @ the I7 but my friend really don't think it's worth that extra $300 for it. And the bag in the picture is Targus Notebook XL , It's a big bag , it did fit the 18.4 no problem , it shall be able to fit a 19" even. But the makemanship feels really bad (could be because I was spoiled by Oakley bags and my military rucks ) , so we will see if that bag can hold 40 lbs worth of gear ( DSLR + LENS+ X505+ X83 ..) .

 

Totally agreed about the parking the hard drive feature. I also have it on my T115-S1100 and I have thus far found it to be quite annoying at times, especially when viewing video....