Qosmio G35-AV650... frustrated

I guess I need to vent and maybe ask for help from more knowledgeable folks than I BTW first post here.. hi!

I'm one of the seemingly few owners of the Qosmio G35-AV650. I bought this laptop last July right around the time it was first coming out... it was my first personal laptop, I wanted something extremely feature-rich and got sucked into the HD-DVD craze. The six months since have been very frustrating. First my vent... please feel free to skip the following paragraph unless you're considering purchasing this laptop and want to be aware of the issues.

Past frustrations include a fan inside the laptop failing, causing the processor to slow to a crawl, which took forever to get replaced. The HD-DVD drive is a little finicky... it tends to stall during extended CD/DVD/HDDVD reads like when installing large software (multi-disc game) or playing a movie. The installed software is complex and cumbersome... there appear to be more than a dozen separate Toshiba utilities on the canned MCE install and it's inclear what half of them do. If you use the recovery CDs to restore things and [in the process] wipe out the QosmioPlayer partition, then you have to request a free QosmioPlayer Recovery CD (free plus $39.95 S&H!!!) from Toshiba to get it back... needless to say, I've made do without it. The screen hinge was made of plastic and as a result has become very loose... the screen constantly shakes and squeaks with even the slightest vibration or movement to the base unit: definitely not portable. HD-DVD playback is through a bundled DVD player alternatiingly called "WinDVD HD" or "WinDVD for Toshiba" which has problems with many HD-DVD titles, doesn't get many updates, is strictly bare-bones and apparently was tossed in favor of an in-house Toshiba HD-DVD Player software in the G35-AV660 which showed up about a month after I bought my laptop and three months after the AV650 was announced. (Talk about product obsolescence!) The fabulous sound system has started to generate chassis rattles whenever LFE sounds play at moderate volume. I can't install Vista because of freezes and installation crashes (Vista Business and Enterprise at work, RTM from MSDN subscription and Ultimate retail which I just received a bit early) and it appears that most of the Toshiba utilities that make the various pieces of this thing work are not available for Vista (yet). Last and most frustrating: support for this laptop is extremely weak, especially among the internet user community. Very few people own this, so there is very little knowledge out there about how to deal with problems. As far as Toshiba's concerned, the model was rendered obsolete by the AV660 three months after the AV650 was announced. The user community is extremely small... one or two people on AVS, one or two reviews on pcworld/cnet/amazon/newegg... and that's about it. So whenever I do run into problems, there's nowhere I can really go for help...

SO... I still respect this laptop... it's fast, has perhaps the best display I've ever seen on a portable (weak hinge aside) and when it's all working like it should, it really is a multimedia laptop like no other...

I wanted to write here in hopes of actually connecting with a few people who own this thing, maybe trying to compare notes to see if others are running into similar or different problems, and perhaps try to come up with solutions and help each other out. This is sort of a hail mary pass for me... if I can't find at least a decent support network I most likely will sell this thing at a big loss and just get an Inspiron. (I guess the Qosmio has taught me the value of laptops built upon standardized, boring components owned by large numbers of people.) But I'd rather try to make something of this in case others are struggling too and looking for a ray of light.

SO... any owners here?

Where is the Toshiba forum on their site? I'd be interested to see that but I've never found such a thing.

I am concerned about software support for this thing... went so far as to review the terms & conditions to ensure that I would have grounds for legal remedy in case Toshiba dropped support for WinDVD HD. I would love to get ahold of the Toshiba HD-DVD player... I would think this is something they ought to offer to 650 users if they're abandoning it so quickly but there's no one to ask, no one to talk to.

European support site! I never thought to check there, as I am in the U.S. I appreciate the link and will spend some time there - thank you

So, have you (or anyone) gotten Vista to install on this thing? I've tried a few times to no avail. I updated to the new BIOS that Toshiba had posted (for Vista RC1??!?) and also used their downloadable SATA drivers to gain access to the local hard disks. However, I continue to get freezes during install with my Vista Ultimate installation. I haven't successfully gotten through the first install phase, yet. Tips welcomed!

Yes!

The G35-AV600 model has a bunch of Vista downloads posted on Toshiba's site. Using the posted SATA drivers I finally was able to get Ultimate installed. I am running the 3.10 BIOS that was posted earlier for the AV650 and AV660.

Some observations -
- most of the Toshiba utilities for Fn keys, hotkeys, touchpad driver all work ok
- SATA driver works however I cannot bring up the RAID console
- the posted nVidia driver does work okay
- the posted audio driver DOES NOT WORK, at least for the AV650. I'm not sure if this is because there's a bug or because the AV650 uses a different sound system than the AV600? (I didn't think so.) At any rate,whatever default driver came with Vista works okay.
- I can play protected DVDs fine in Media Center.
- Also posted is Toshiba HD-DVD Player for Vista. This got me excited - finally a chance that I could ditch WinDVD HD! Well it does install and on playback it does even initially scale the window to wide screenformat, but then I get a pop-up box saying that output cannot be sent to an external display and to use Fn-F5 to fix after the player exits. Well Fn-F5 only shows my laptop panel active so I'm not sure what's going on. No doubt, it's a DRM issue of some kind. Hopefully it's not due to me having the AV650 which initially came with WinDVD instead of the Toshiba player which allegedly is better. I wish I had a test HDDVD encoded without AACS enabled so that I could troubleshoot.
- WinDVD HD (from the XP install) does not function under Vista.


Overall the AV650 is extremely snappy with Vista. It's functional enough to boot and work. Both network devices are recognized and function well. My buttons at the top of the keyboard (media controls, brightness, Dolby, etc.) are not working. Volume dial is working as are the Fn keys.

I'll let you know how things progress. So far Vista Ultimate is very stable on the Qosmio and the Media Center works very well. I'm not wanting at all for more performance (despite the vanilla Core Duo and 1GB RAM vs. yours) so that part is very good. However I still can't get the TV Tuner and HD-DVD capabilities running.

IF Vista can run on these things, it would be very promising - Vista has one HUGE feature I've been interested in... software room correction for audio output. I once paid several thousand dollars for a receiver for this capability that now comes bundled with the OS. This would make the Qosmio a much more interesting HTPC-type device.

It was 4.3 being held back by the hard drive. Graphics were 5.2/4.8 and processor/memory were around 4.7. I suspect that with larger/faster hard drives and more memory, overall it should hit near 5.0. I had decided to try striping the drives which is when I learned that the raid console doesn't work under Vista.

Only game I play is WoW however I did run 3dmark06 and got about the same score that I did under XP MCE (can't remember it offhand). I don't think gaming performance is too bad... Vista does impose more overhead on the other hand I think the posted nvidia drivers for Vista are a lot newer than the ones that shipped with the Qosmio and weren't updated much since.

Well, for what it's worth, I slowly am getting this thing to function under Vista. I seem to have lost the secure digital slot reader, sound still crackles every now and then, and HD-DVD is still dead. On the other hand, I've gotten some drivers that get all the hotkeys, volume dial, touchpad, biometric reader and similar functions working, and even have the RAID console running.

I discovered that if you start the mirroring process for the raid console, then decide to quit it halfway through (by clicking cancel) it permanently thinks your raid 1 is in a degraded state. not sure how to fix that (yet).

HD-DVD has been an ongoing frustration. I found a 3.20 BIOS on the U.K. toshiba site (I was running 3.10 which was posted for a short while for Vista RTM1) and did that upgrade. I also found a "32" firmware upgrade for the HD-DVD drive off the Toshiba Canada site which also downloaded and installed correctly without issues, however the Toshiba HD-DVD player for Vista continues to tell me that it cannot output to an external display device. This is frustrating - I've turned off the external display. Next step, having done these upgrades, is to lug the thing down to my projector and try HDMI. Who knows...

I continue to be stunned at Toshiba's non-support for Vista on a flagship product. It only strengthens my conviction to not buy a Toshiba laptop again. Too bad I spent so much money on this, but I guess that's the price early adopters pay.

I have a feeling that my HD-DVD problems are due to my nvidia driver. Unfortunately there's no suitable driver posted by either toshiba or nvidia for vista for the geforce go 7600.

The last XP driver (which I'm using now) has some issues supporting multiple displays... seems to work fine but eventually my 2nd clone display (24" dell 2405) starts showing weird corruption issues that look like what sync issues look like on a CRT, followed by Vista informing me that the nvidia driver died but then self-healed. Miraculous.

I definitely recommend that Qosmio G35 owners steer clear of Vista for the moment. If anyone out there has figured out the secret to HD-DVD on these things, let me know!

One more thing - major jeers to Toshiba U.S. for, well, being what they are, and major props to Toshiba's arms in Canada and Europe who actually have some drivers and BIOS updates posted. It's gotten me wondering whether they get the better quality products too.

My G35 is functional enough to be used for work again. Vista Ultimate runs smoothly and quickly. However several pieces of hardware are not supported right now. The nVidia drivers do tend to error out (driver itself restarts) and not be happy with windows dreamscene from Vista Ultimate, but it's not too severe. I've tried the AV600 posted drivers, the AV650 XP drivers, the latest drivers posted on the Canada (I think) web site and the latest drivers available on laptopvideo2go, all behave about the same. HDMI works fine to my projector, and HD-DVD disks read fine, but I can't get playback going with the downloadable Toshiba HD-DVD player. (I've tried versions 2.3, 2.5 and 3.0 from various Toshiba support sites around the globe.)

I haven't had much luck with the TV tuner either but I don't use that very often.

The RAID console is a bit buggy although the actual drivers seem to be okay.

I'd wait for a bit unless you want to experiment/learn and don't rely on the machine. I've just ordered a thinkpad x60 so I expect to be less dependent on the Qosmio going forward.

Note: Toshiba US has yet to post any kind of driver support for the AV650/660 models that I can see. So you'll be on your own if problems arise.

Sure did. I can't get that program to work under Vista... Program Compatibility Assistant pops up to let me know that the program has known compatibility issues, and it goes downhill from there. I probably should run it from XP at some point to see what's in it.