well, i bought my M40 this saturday, have been playing with it since, and i think it's amazing!
we already had an M30 in the family, which we were more than happy with, but i really needed a laptop for uni, so i spent a fair bit of time tossing up between sony/toshiba, and after looking at the sony's, and unfortunately realising that what they had under the hood was mostly rubish, and wouldn't allow me to play games like doom 3/hl2/ut 04 well, i went with toshiba.
i went to the stores to have a look at the M40, because they really only came out in australia a week ago, and at first, i thought it was less appealing than the M30. i didn't like the design as much, the case seemed way too shiny, they removed the tv out button, changed the buttons on the side from metal to plastic.... how wrong i was. the shininess was just a protective plastic layer which the store hadn't removed, it looks uch better now. the loss of the tv out button is fine, because i've just assigned the web button to do that, and as for the buttons not being metal, i actually think the m40 looks a lot cooler now that i've had a chance to play with it, and having those media buttons beside the keyboard is great.
in australia, there are two versions of the M40, the 7009/8009. oddly enough, the 7009 is the higher end model, and the one i'm using to type this post on. it has the 1.86ghz PM, 60gb hdd, and 1 gb of ram. the 8009 has the 1.7ghz processor, 512mb of ram, and a 40gb hdd. both come with xp pro which is great because our entire home network is on pro, and i'll probably use some more of the networking/remote access features down the track.
as for defects... i bought the laptop from a store (not online), so before i left the store, i did a quick check for dead pixels, and i'm happy to report that they're all functioning properly, not a dead one on the screen. as for the fan noise, it's far quiter than my pc, i can't really hear it at all. there's no high pitch noise when the ac adaptor is plugged in, and as for the dvd drive noise... it's slightly on the louder side of things, but it doesn't bother me at all, and they even include a program which runs at start up that signficantly reduces the noise of the drive (at the expense of speed of course)
so far, i've used the wireless lan, which works perfectly (i've tried b and g, both highly sucessfully, no drop outs at all), i've tried the inbuilt modem (which i'm sadly using atm because my cable is capped until the end of the month), i've set up the bluetooth, which works like a charm (great for syncing with my mobile phone)... they say the bluetooth may interfere with wifi, but there's a great little function key (Fn + F8), which lets you easily choose which one of the two (or both), are on at one time, with the wireless switch on the front being an override. i'm so glad it has a multi card reader, because our M30 only has SD which really blows, because we only ever use sony memory sticks. i set this up straight away and tested a meory stick/memory stick Pro/meory stick DUO/ Memory stick DUO Pro, all work like a charm.
as for the speed of the hard drive, it's only 4200rpm, and against the advice of ppl here, i got the warranty from the store, because it' part of the largest retail chain in australia, and i got a 5 year extended warranty instead of 3, and when their warranty kicks in, i can upgrade the hdd without voiding the warranty, so when the time comes, i'm sure they'll have hdd's at least 100 gb 7200 rpm for around the same price the 60gb 7200 rpms are atm, maybe even a bit cheaper. regardless, i expectred the 4200 to be horrible after reading what others have said, but it really doesn't bother me at all. even the loading times on games like doom 3 isn't that far off my pc which has two 7200 rpm hdd's.
for the gamers out there, this thing is extremely impressive, and can come close to my 2.4ghz p4, 1 gb ram, gf 6800 GT 256 mb. i've run ut 04 with every setting on the absolute max flawlessly, and doom 3 with aa on one etting below ultra, and i found i had to enable verticle snc, because the frame rate was above 60fps and was causing tearing. so there's no worries in the gfx department at all... it's a powerhouse.
the speakers are decent (not out of this world though), and the media buttons easily accessible on the side make listening/viewing media that much easier, and i'm glad it comes prepackaged with wmp 10 not 9, cause that's one less upgrade i have to do.
the only things i really haven't tested are the battery life and the dvd burner. i'll burn a dual layered dvd some time this week, and i'll test the battery life after i go back to uni next week, but the FN + F2 function, is great for easily changing power settings, what i can say though, is that even with the computer on, it charged very quickly, in about 3 hrs i think....
the only thing left for me to do is to accessorise a bit. i'll eventually buy at least one 12 cell battery, a logitech cordless mouse (hopefully the V500), and a case (which i'll probably order today), i don't really want a dedicated carrying case for my laptop, because i want to be able to put it in different bags, and only have to carry away one bag to uni, not two, so i'm probably going to get one of those soft cases from sony (VGPCP2).
one very satisfied toshiba customer signing off
I decided to upgrade today, from the JM 300-E, so I returned it at FutureShop.. (got a top end router with it..) and bought the YP300E .
