Toshiba Satellite A505-S6960

Pros: Style, color and speakers. Surprisingly fast despite using a 5400 rpm HDD. Battery lasts between 4.5 to 6 hrs. 320 GB HDD. All the necessary wi-fi standards.

Cons: Fingerprints all over. Battery seems to drain exponentially IE: if battery meter starts with 7 hrs, after 15 mins of use (flash video or internet browsing) it can show between 30 to 45 mins of drain. Comes with junkware. Power adaptor often gets hot!

Summary: This is my 1st laptop. Wasn't used to it at start because I've been using a quad core desktop that I built, so I'm not used to having a new PC preloaded with stuff such as trialware like MS Office, Quickbooks and an anti-virus. I uninstalled them. Luckily I already had a full install CD of Office '07 and a current subscription to McAffee from my ISP. As I mentioned before I'm not used to a preloaded PC. I found it slow (8 sec) to fully open some programs and later realized that defragmentation was required. Initially I assumed it unnecessary since this PC was barely a week old, but there it is. So friends, I guess this goes with any preloaded computer you get... defrag it! After doing this it loads everything quick. The included power supply often gets hot! Sometimes I fear it'll melt eventually. Only thing I dislike about the processor is that it doesn't have virtualization. Also watch out with the F12 key while booting up; it'll dissable the wonderful speakers it comes with and you can only hear audio through the headphone jack. When this happened I thought it got messed up. The documentation doesn't mention anything about the F12 key doing this. Ok. Other things I like is that it has a radar like graphical representation where it shows you the nearby wi-fi spots. These spots move in an out (you at the center of course) in approximation to you depending on their signal strength as well as additional details. It's fun to watch. There's a vibration protection for the HDD when the laptop is moved with different sensitivity settings. If you're always gonna have it at your desk then if you feel like it you can lower the sensitivity setting, but what for? It doesn't hamper the performance so I'd leave it at maximum if I were you. The screen looks great and there are good options for calibrating the resolution, aspect ratio, ect.

So I'm becoming satisfied with it. For the price range Toshiba is a brand that has more positive consumer reviews than Dell, HP, and Compaq. I RECOMEND IT HIGHLY!!!

Updated on Feb 16, 2010

By now I've had it for several months. 1st thing I noticed is that the PCMIA slot, it lost grip to any card inserted in there including the cover. The cover simply falls out eventhough you heard and felt it click in, but if you tip the laptop over it'll fall out. Another was the Vista SP2 update, it constantly made the sound from the speakers go away. This was remediated only by uninstalling SP2 (I did this several times and the conclusion was the same).
And lastly but most important! This laptop is advertised to come with an 800 MHz 4 GB RAM... IT'S A LIE!!!! (at least partially). The RAM is 400 MHz. But it's ok because I'll upgrade it to a real 8GB PC2 6400 800 MHz. In conclusion, it's scary how manufacturers overhype their specs in order to make a sale.