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I have been busy with school (electrical engineering) but I decided I would finally put up a small review on the m70-fe5 (future shop exclusive) laptop that I purchased in mid December.

Specifications
Intel Centrino M740 1.73 Ghz
1024 MB DDR2 @ 533Mhz
100 GB HDD
ATI Radeon x700 256 MB Card
CD/DVD RW Combo Drive
15.4 inch Tru-Brite Display

Pretty non-detailed specs...

Physical Description
I have to be honest, the m70 is a great looking laptop and I have received nothing but compliments from friends and people at school. Combining performance and an aesthetically pleasing look, I am very happy with the look of the laptop. As you can see from the pictures below, the laptop came with a copper coating on the lid. I wouldn't pick copper as personal preference but it's not that big of a deal to me because I never really look at it. The keyboard is good enough and the keys have a fairly solid feel to them so no complaints there. The speakers as you can see in the pictures are located to the lower right and left. To some that may be a big deal but I do have 2.1 Logitech z2300 speaker system with a 120W subwoofer so the built in speakers have become fairly useless . The tru-brite screen is really clear and no complaints there. During the day however in rooms with open windows the glare is absolutely brutal. I am not sure what kind of finish the screen has but the glare can be pretty bad depending on what angle you sit at. Besides the glare the screen has been very nice for general computer use, programming and video gaming. The only complaint I have about the actual physical build of this laptop has to be that the audio output for speakers is right infront, between my wrists and right infront of the touchpad. It's not like im making contact with it, it's just that I find it a pain in the ass to route a wire from behind my desk, around the laptop and into the front. Overall, it's a great looking laptop, fairly quiet and it is definately an eye catcher.

Performance
This section will be fairly short . I ran 3dmark05 and received a score of 2820. I am not sure how that compares to other laptops but I am really not to worried about it. For the x700 card, I installed a NGO Optimized Ultra Driver from www.guru3d.com. If anyone has a better driver for this card please pm me. For general use, the computer runs really smoothly. Adding the extra 512mb of ram helped out for situations when I have several programs running. For gaming, so far I have only played HL2, Counter-Strike Source, Day of Defeat Source and a couple of other games. This laptop CAN handle all those games at full settings. Running Counter-Strike:Source and Day of Defeat: Source at full settings with High Dynamic Range is no issue with this laptop. Games run great! Performance wise, I have to say that I am fairly pleased with my purchase so far.

Other Goodies (Including Pictures)
I am running a dualboot with Windows XP and Ubuntu(linux-dist) because I do alot of programming and linux handles these applications alot more smoothly then Windows does. The m70 came with "Toshiba Power Saver" which helps a little bit in conserving battery life. If I sit around in class talking on msn while playing online poker/surfing the net I get about 2 hours of battery life. Not great, but I wasn't looking for a laptop where I could get a larger amount of battery time.

Watch Out!
I bought the first laptop, brought it home and it had a dead pixel. So I returned it and exchanged it for another one. I then took that one home and realized it had a dead pixel as well. So i FINALLY got one without a dead pixel. If your thinking about buying this laptop, check out the screen first!

Overall Thoughts
It is a really nice laptop to have. I was considering buying the Asus z71v which is relatively in the same performance range. I couldn't resist the physical appearance of this computer. I am fairly happy with the laptop for far and I definately recommend it to anyone considering buying it. If I could change anything about this laptop it would definately be the audio output port. Besides that, it has caused me no problems. Now you can see the pictars!









Thanks for reading.. Some pictures are kinda not sharp.