- Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
-
6 out of 6 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Very Sharp!"
Pros: Large, clear, and bright screen; Fast processor; DVD+/-RW drive; A/G Wi-Fi; The works!
Cons: Oddly enough, only 512 MB RAM.
Summary: This is first and foremost a desktop replacement; it's not for the faint of heart or a frequent flier interested in battery life or portability. I got it because I found myself using my laptop more and more, while my desktop sat unused upstairs.
This laptop runs circles around any computer I've ever previously owned, and is the first out of the box to burn DVDs from .avi files. It did so on the first try and in realtime, a testament to the power of its hyperthreading 3.33 GHz Pentium 4.
Its seventeen inch widescreen monitor is great for watching DVDs in any room in the house, and its Atheros antenna picks up my G network well anywhere in the house. Upstairs near the router, I get 108 Mbps signals, which baffles me, since it's supposed to be a 54 Mbps network. So far, I haven't called Toshiba's tech support to complain about it, however.
It doesn't come with Microsoft Office, but the mix of included software is otherwise good; all useful and no useless filler.
For all its heavy duty inclusions, it strangely enough has only 512 MB RAM. So far, I haven't felt the lack of a full Gig, but it's a little odd for something this big to skimp on that one area. It is upgradable to 2 GB, and the included RAM is a single 512 and an open spot instead of two disposable 256es.
It comes with a 100 GB hard drive--big enough to store my entire music library, my entire document and digital image collection and still do image, sound, and video editing. I installed Photoshop Elements 2.0 and a Wacom tablet, and it assimilated both like long-lost cousins. I can run Starry Night Enthusiast without waiting and Microsoft Office without the wait. I can run all three at the same time and still play Winamp in the background, and the processor still dares me to do more.
Amazingly, it's $1800 at Best Buy, plus the ubiquitous three year warranty they always offer. (With laptops, they're actually a good idea.) I walked out the door with the thing for around $2250, paying extra for the warranty plus ZoneAlarm and Norton SystemWorks. It only came with a basic Norton AntiVirus with sixty days of antivirus definitions, and Windows' built-in firewall, but I have yet to see anyone offer more.
I've heard good things about Toshiba and I've sworn they'd be my next laptop for several years. This one certainly lives up to their reputation.
- 1 reply to this review
-
At first I was a little weary of the 17" screen for the fact of games and productivity programs being distorted but I was wrong about that. Working with Excel is really great with the size screen that it has since you do not need to keep on scrolling back and forth to see the whole entire spreadsheet.
In addition with gaming, almost all the games that are out there that are brand new acutally seem to reconfigure themselves with the wide screen. I know with the HP's widescreen laptops from a year ago or so that was not the picture from what I saw.
I got mine from QVC with the easy pay option and I it cost me less than $2000 which was really great since I am a poor college student and on top of that I was able to get it with out getting the cheap laptop bag. I bought two laptop bags for it one from Best Buy (backpack style for classes) and my university's computer store (laptop tote bag that was made by women for women which I got for work).
The only downfall to getting this laptop but its the same for any computer you buy anymore laptop or desktop was all the extra preloaded software that came with it. I was surprised though that it did not have as much junk as what you would get with a Dell computer which was a relief for me since I did not have to stay there for hours on end to uninstall all the junk software. A lot of the preloaded software that came with it such as Microsoft Works (full version) and Norton was a big plus. If you get it from QVC I know you do get the Standard Edition of Office 2003 but its only a evaluation version, but that did not anger me at all since I already had the Developer Edition of Office 2003 since thats the version I use for my business/MIS classes.
What also made me really happy with this laptop that it acutally had a program that you could choose on how the laptop would function for what type of work you were doing so you could save battery power and so on. I have only had it for 6 days and since then I have not yet used my desktop computer that I just built since I got it.
