ls3mach
01-13-2005, 01:30 PM
I ended up sending this back. For anyone that might be looking into buying this laptop I will post my thoughts.
1. The monitor is beuatiful. 1440x900 It is a dual lamp design and in my opinion is the best monitor on any laptop to date.
2. The P-M (Dothan) is a great processor. It ran very smooth for a 1.8GHz machine with a 400MHz FSB. The Dothan is said to be clock speed X 1.8. So in this case the processor was roughly equivilent to a 3.2GHz P4. This is achieved mainly through cache size 2048KB and arcitecture.
3. The nVideo Go5700, blows. It is a 128MB video card, but I am not really that impressed with it. My 3dMark03 scores where 3200. If I overclocked the GPU I could get 3600, but there were TONS of artifacts. Unplayable at this speed. I would have much prefered the mobile Radeon 9700 or 9800 128MB gpu. Higher scores might have been achieved with more ram, but it I doubt it would have made a huge difference. Probably just a couple of hundred points. This gpu is probably fine for someone who will be doing lite gaming, but when I bought this unit I bought it wanting to play EQ2. It would play EQ2 on "balanced", but would clog up when you got in a busy city.
4. The battery life was not so hot. It was less than 2 hours. I was at the time running the monitor with full brightness and bluetooth on, wifi might have been on too. If you turned down alot of settings and were not using wifi or bluetooth 3 hours was probably attainable.
5. It would be a great portable DVD player. The large screen coupled with the fact that it had a DVD mode. You could watch a DVD or TV without starting up Windows. I didnt test the battery life but I imagine it would easily finish a DVD.
6. This laptop is not for the weak, it is fairly weighty at 10lbs.
7. DVD burner was mediocre. I could not burn on my TDK 8x +R media. It did just fine on Memorex 4x -R media. The drive was supposed to be an 8x DVD Super-multi drive. It never burned anything at 8x for me, except for CDs and they burned much faster than 8x. +R media went at 2.4x and -R media burned at 4x. DVD remote worked great. It integrated pefectly into the MCE part of XP. Controlling the laptop and navigating the menus was a breeze. RGB outputs worked just fine, but were a little trickier to get to work with my Toshiba HDTV. I couldnt get it to go full screen properly. If I had opened the manual or played with it a little longer the results may have been better. DVR functionality. I never used the TV tuner.
8. Keyboard was superb and the touchpad mouse was ok. I did not like it aswell as my previous Toshiba. Fairly subjective thing, also I never tinkered with the settings.
9. Probably could have used some more ram, I would have upgraded it if I were to keep the unit. The ram it used was 200pin PC2700, so it was fairly cheap. Also it came with 1X512 instead of 2X256, this is a very nice feature and you generally do not see this in notebooks.
10. 2 HDDs primary was a 60GB and the secondary was a 40GB. Each were 5400RPM instead of the standard 4200RPM that is usually found in Toshiba notebooks. I also here that dual boot would have been easy. When you start the laptop you supposedly can hit fn+F8 and choice which HDD will boot. That is especially convient when running a linux distro. Also 2 HDD is good for performance because you can have your page file on the non-booted drive and it will give a nice performance boost. Also 2 HDDs is great to use with the DVR.
11. This laptop is BIG. It is the largest I have owned. It was done well though. When I pulled this out of my backpack, people were silenced. It has a major wow factor. Then you flip it open to reveal that screen and people are impressed. If you are trying to impress a client with a presentation, do it on this. It just says money. The most common question when I pulled it out, even tech people. That must have been expensive, how much was it? Not one person asked about specs first. Just the screen and cost.
12. The nic on this laptop worked like all the others, plug it in and voila you have internet. Wifi was a snap to setup and came with a handy config free app, as all Toshibas do. You had the choice of turning the anteneas on or off via a switch on the side, or by using a function key. Bluetooth and wifi could be turned on or off idepentedly of eachother and both could be used at the same time. I used the bluetooth with my Treo 650 smartphone to dial up to the internet. Connecting them was fairly easy, as Toshiba included a connection utility. Occasionally you would have to turn the bluetooth on and off to get it to make the initial connection properly, overall very easy to use. It picked up my phone and worked like a champ. I got as far as 10 feet away and the speed never seemed to change. It claimed 115kbps, accourding to the network icon next to the clock. I had very good speeds using this and had no hickups. The only problem I had was occassionaly while using wifi, with no RJ-45 cable connected, the wifi would either lose signal or drop a packet and it would then pop up the dialup connection which I had been using for my bluetooth phone. In all fairness it could have been my router that caused this and the computer was just trying to fix it fast. It was not a common incident and only happened about 5 times. If I disabled dialing a connection in windows internet options it would not do it again, until after I had used the DUN and had another hickup with wifi.
Highlights:
Dothan is good.
Monitor is :drool: GREAT.
Keyboard layout was familar and felt sturdy to me.
Ram was easily upgradable
2 HDD with decent speed.
Lows:
128MB video card. Clearly the lowest point of this laptop.
Poorish battery life for a P-M. Good for a 17" laptop though.
Expensive at just under $3000, you had better hope they screw up your original order.
Final thoughts.
If you are in the market for a new laptop, tivo, or tv you might want to consider this unit. If you live in alone or are cramped for space in your room or living room this might be a good solution for you. The 17" screen is very easy to view even from across the room. The speakers have decent sound, but to me seemed to rattle something inside of the unit and I personally found them too small at high volumes. The new Tivo units are not cheap, if you are thinking of investing in one for a bedroom this would probably be ideal. It would easily get rid of a DVD player, TV, and your Tivo. If you can stomach the price. This might be a good buy for a college student. It would be perfect for a small dorm and is powerful enough to be used as a desktop replacement, while it is mobile enough to be carried with you from time to time. If they are needing one to take to class, they would probably be better off with the smaller screen version as battery life and portability would be much higher. If you need a lightweight laptop that will get good battery life with wifi or bluetooth on, this is not the laptop for you. This is and all out desktop replacement, but is not suited for a serious gamer. It will easily handle most of todays games on modest settings, but will not satisfy the desktop gaming experience.
Did I mention the screen?
Lonzo
This was my first review. Please let me know what you guys think and if I missed anything. If you have any other questions let me know and I will answer them the best I can. Comments are much appreciated. If this has helped you one way or the other in your decision let me know.
1. The monitor is beuatiful. 1440x900 It is a dual lamp design and in my opinion is the best monitor on any laptop to date.
2. The P-M (Dothan) is a great processor. It ran very smooth for a 1.8GHz machine with a 400MHz FSB. The Dothan is said to be clock speed X 1.8. So in this case the processor was roughly equivilent to a 3.2GHz P4. This is achieved mainly through cache size 2048KB and arcitecture.
3. The nVideo Go5700, blows. It is a 128MB video card, but I am not really that impressed with it. My 3dMark03 scores where 3200. If I overclocked the GPU I could get 3600, but there were TONS of artifacts. Unplayable at this speed. I would have much prefered the mobile Radeon 9700 or 9800 128MB gpu. Higher scores might have been achieved with more ram, but it I doubt it would have made a huge difference. Probably just a couple of hundred points. This gpu is probably fine for someone who will be doing lite gaming, but when I bought this unit I bought it wanting to play EQ2. It would play EQ2 on "balanced", but would clog up when you got in a busy city.
4. The battery life was not so hot. It was less than 2 hours. I was at the time running the monitor with full brightness and bluetooth on, wifi might have been on too. If you turned down alot of settings and were not using wifi or bluetooth 3 hours was probably attainable.
5. It would be a great portable DVD player. The large screen coupled with the fact that it had a DVD mode. You could watch a DVD or TV without starting up Windows. I didnt test the battery life but I imagine it would easily finish a DVD.
6. This laptop is not for the weak, it is fairly weighty at 10lbs.
7. DVD burner was mediocre. I could not burn on my TDK 8x +R media. It did just fine on Memorex 4x -R media. The drive was supposed to be an 8x DVD Super-multi drive. It never burned anything at 8x for me, except for CDs and they burned much faster than 8x. +R media went at 2.4x and -R media burned at 4x. DVD remote worked great. It integrated pefectly into the MCE part of XP. Controlling the laptop and navigating the menus was a breeze. RGB outputs worked just fine, but were a little trickier to get to work with my Toshiba HDTV. I couldnt get it to go full screen properly. If I had opened the manual or played with it a little longer the results may have been better. DVR functionality. I never used the TV tuner.
8. Keyboard was superb and the touchpad mouse was ok. I did not like it aswell as my previous Toshiba. Fairly subjective thing, also I never tinkered with the settings.
9. Probably could have used some more ram, I would have upgraded it if I were to keep the unit. The ram it used was 200pin PC2700, so it was fairly cheap. Also it came with 1X512 instead of 2X256, this is a very nice feature and you generally do not see this in notebooks.
10. 2 HDDs primary was a 60GB and the secondary was a 40GB. Each were 5400RPM instead of the standard 4200RPM that is usually found in Toshiba notebooks. I also here that dual boot would have been easy. When you start the laptop you supposedly can hit fn+F8 and choice which HDD will boot. That is especially convient when running a linux distro. Also 2 HDD is good for performance because you can have your page file on the non-booted drive and it will give a nice performance boost. Also 2 HDDs is great to use with the DVR.
11. This laptop is BIG. It is the largest I have owned. It was done well though. When I pulled this out of my backpack, people were silenced. It has a major wow factor. Then you flip it open to reveal that screen and people are impressed. If you are trying to impress a client with a presentation, do it on this. It just says money. The most common question when I pulled it out, even tech people. That must have been expensive, how much was it? Not one person asked about specs first. Just the screen and cost.
12. The nic on this laptop worked like all the others, plug it in and voila you have internet. Wifi was a snap to setup and came with a handy config free app, as all Toshibas do. You had the choice of turning the anteneas on or off via a switch on the side, or by using a function key. Bluetooth and wifi could be turned on or off idepentedly of eachother and both could be used at the same time. I used the bluetooth with my Treo 650 smartphone to dial up to the internet. Connecting them was fairly easy, as Toshiba included a connection utility. Occasionally you would have to turn the bluetooth on and off to get it to make the initial connection properly, overall very easy to use. It picked up my phone and worked like a champ. I got as far as 10 feet away and the speed never seemed to change. It claimed 115kbps, accourding to the network icon next to the clock. I had very good speeds using this and had no hickups. The only problem I had was occassionaly while using wifi, with no RJ-45 cable connected, the wifi would either lose signal or drop a packet and it would then pop up the dialup connection which I had been using for my bluetooth phone. In all fairness it could have been my router that caused this and the computer was just trying to fix it fast. It was not a common incident and only happened about 5 times. If I disabled dialing a connection in windows internet options it would not do it again, until after I had used the DUN and had another hickup with wifi.
Highlights:
Dothan is good.
Monitor is :drool: GREAT.
Keyboard layout was familar and felt sturdy to me.
Ram was easily upgradable
2 HDD with decent speed.
Lows:
128MB video card. Clearly the lowest point of this laptop.
Poorish battery life for a P-M. Good for a 17" laptop though.
Expensive at just under $3000, you had better hope they screw up your original order.
Final thoughts.
If you are in the market for a new laptop, tivo, or tv you might want to consider this unit. If you live in alone or are cramped for space in your room or living room this might be a good solution for you. The 17" screen is very easy to view even from across the room. The speakers have decent sound, but to me seemed to rattle something inside of the unit and I personally found them too small at high volumes. The new Tivo units are not cheap, if you are thinking of investing in one for a bedroom this would probably be ideal. It would easily get rid of a DVD player, TV, and your Tivo. If you can stomach the price. This might be a good buy for a college student. It would be perfect for a small dorm and is powerful enough to be used as a desktop replacement, while it is mobile enough to be carried with you from time to time. If they are needing one to take to class, they would probably be better off with the smaller screen version as battery life and portability would be much higher. If you need a lightweight laptop that will get good battery life with wifi or bluetooth on, this is not the laptop for you. This is and all out desktop replacement, but is not suited for a serious gamer. It will easily handle most of todays games on modest settings, but will not satisfy the desktop gaming experience.
Did I mention the screen?
Lonzo
This was my first review. Please let me know what you guys think and if I missed anything. If you have any other questions let me know and I will answer them the best I can. Comments are much appreciated. If this has helped you one way or the other in your decision let me know.