upgrading M40 memory

Hi all,

Nice little forum you have here. I'm researching for my first notebook and the Tosh M40 has caught my interest, along with Acer's Travelmate 8100. I like everything about it hardware wise except that it comes with a chipset that should be able to use DDR2 3200 memory, yet it ships with DDR 2700. I guess it's a cost saving measure.

My question is, has anyone swapped the stock DDR 2700 stick, for DDR2 3200 ? I would want to immediately upgrade to 1gb memory, with the intention of adding another 1gb down the road. While this wouldn't be my primary workstation, I plan to run a couple 3D animation proggies on this thing and memory is important.

On a side note when is then product cycle for this machine ? If this one is close to being replaced I might wait and see if Toshiba will use a WSXGA display on the next version.

Thanks for your help

Thanks for the info.

Why would Toshiba hamstring this rig ? What's the point ? The chipset fully supports the faster bus and memory. Makes no sense to me. Sure, sell it with cheaper ram to keep the price point down, but crippling it on purpose seems idiotic.

Thanks again, maybe I'll keep looking around.

I'm sure the M40 is a decent machine, but for the price it's severly outclassed by, say, the Acer Travelmate 8104. Both use the same chipset, but the 8104 uses proper ram @ 533mhz. It also has a WSXGA screen res, which is very nice on a 15.4" screen. The M40 has no Bluetooth, um..a totally standard feature on virtually all notebooks for a couple years now, wtf. No DVI out on the M40. The Acer has a 100gb hd standard.

The only thing about the M40 that still intrigues me is the Geforce 6600, over the ATI x700 in the Acer, and that's only because historically Nvidia has written better drivers for their gaming class GPU's allowing them to run high-end 3D animation programs, which I use everyday. If I was purley a gamer, I'd have no issue with the ATI gpu. The 8104 also comes with Windows XP Professional standard.

I wanted to like the M40, but it really is a marginal laptop compared to the competition. I'm still baffled by Toshiba's decision to use DDR1 2700 ram. DDR2 is so common that it couldn't have been much of a cost saver, at the most it would have added $ 10-20 to the retail cost.

Not to say it won't do the job wonderfully for e-mail/internet/students, but for $100-200 more you can get a machine that is flat out superior and since it's such a pain in the ass, or impossible, to upgrade a laptop I'm not going to buy a machine that's been intentionally crippled from the factory. Like the glossy screen though.

Good points, and I don't want to sound like I'm bashing Toshiba, it made my short list for a reason. I've got a Toshiba HDTV that I love. I'm just one of those techy kind of guys and it would always nag in the back of my mind knowing that the hardware I just spent mucho cash on wasn't being used to it's fullest.

I've had a look at the Acer this weekend and it looks and feels to be of high quality, although I've never owned an Acer before, and have to admit that based on their desktop systems I thought they were junk. However, their laptops seem to get high marks in every review I've been able to get my hands on, and the Travelmate 8104 in particular has everything I want except for the glossy screen.

That being said I'm still going to research a bit longer, it's just too much monet to blow on the first shiny new toy I see.

Thanks for the help.