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8 out of 8 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"Excellent for school"
Pros: Excellent widescreen LCD; quiet keyboard; great battery life; DVD+/-RW drive; excellent sound; 4 USB ports; relatively quiet operation
Cons: Somewhat heavy for a thin-and-light laptop; design quirks; removable rubber cap on multimedia card slot; comes will too many trial programs installed
Summary: If you're actually going to take advantage of all the multimedia goodies this laptop offers, then the $1400 you'll pay for it would be a sweet deal. But if you don't need 100GB of hard drive space and won't be burning DVDs, look elsewhere for a cheaper laptop with similar performance specs that will make it just as fast.
I got this Toshiba laptop with $300 worth of rebates, making the final price about $1100--certainly a great deal. It performs well and has never stuttered with its 512MB of somewhat slow, 333MHz DDR1 SDRAM.
In my experience so far, the 5400rpm hard drive helps a lot--programs load a lot quicker, especially when multitasking.
While the keyboard doesn't feel as comfortable as my older Toshiba Satellite A15-S129, it's much quieter, and sacrifices only some comfort. It may be important to note that, in a direct comparision, the M55-S325's keyboard feels a lot better than that of the HP Pavilion dv4000's or Dell's Latitude X200.
Once again, this laptop performs very quickly--and it doesn't take very long for it to restart when you need to. Charging the battery from zero to 100% takes about 4 hours, and battery life is approximately 3 hours under the "Normal" power-saving profile and moderate usage.
I am disappointed that this laptop has some design quirks. It's quite hard to explain, but its idiosyncracies in appearance prevent it from looking as great as it performs.
And, like many other manufacturers' laptops these days, there is a lot of trial software preinstalled on this laptop--plan on taking a couple of hours to uninstall these programs, and installing your own useful software and upgrading existing programs like RealPlayer, Quicktime and Acrobat Reader.
