Now for some nit-picking. The media control buttons (play, mute etc) emit a beep whenever you touch them, i’d prefer they work silently, since you may touch them by mistake when typing. This can be fixed easily though, using the hardware options under the Toshiba program menu. The display screen is not really white, it’s a little yellowish in comparison with stand alone LCD monitors.

To summarize, the wonderful performance of this computer is superb value at this price.

First the pluses. i really like the display at the Toshiba and its keyboard. I also just like the placement of the keys better than the Gateway. I also liked the touchpad and the mouse clicks at the Toshiba better.

Now the minueses: I hate the undeniable fact that the fan activates frequently at the Toshiba. Although i’m just using the browser to view static pages, the fan activates and its not super quiet. So i’m able to hear the fan. If i’m using Youtube, the fan is on almost throughout. Over the years, the lowest of the laptop at the left was also getting hot and that i could feel it on my leg.

In comparison the Gateway is super quiet and the fan isn’t ON. i will return this and purchase the Gateway instead. Sorry Toshiba!

But this laptop worked GREAT right out of the box. Beautiful to look at, ridiculously easy to set up, and a pleasure to use. Minimum “bloat-ware” for you to dispose of later. I would personally ignore the cool-0but-annoying facial recogntion feature and use a plain old password instead.

Only two minor complaints, but not enough to kill a five-star review:

1. The touchpad is a little TOO sensitive and kept selecting things when I was just hovering; all you must do is disable the touch-to-select feature. No big deal.

2. I did have to call Toshiba support once. I had shut down the laptop (for the first time), and when I brought it back out, the flexibility button would not work. (Yikes!) According to the service rep (who was wrong but would not admit it), I must have shut down the laptop the wrong way (unless going to Start / Shut Down is “the wrong way”). He also told me NEVER to use hibernate or sleep (which does beg a question, doesn’t it?). The solution was to pull the battery and unplug, press the power button for 10 seconds to drain power (?), then plug in with no battery. Voila, it started, and I have had no problems since. But truly odd, no?

Anyway, great product — highly recommended.

So I got this Toshiba since it was an awesome compromise between a netbook and a whole sized laptop, and the cost was also about halfway between those two. Like a netbook, there isn’t a built-in CD/DVD drive, but in other respects it’s pretty much a full-strength laptop. The keyboard and screen are full-sized, it has all the usual ports (including HDMI), and its performance is really good.

It’s light enough to carry around easily, and battery life is OK (maybe 4-5 hours). The keyboard does flex a little, but you don’t really notice this when typing. The screen is very sharp and evenly lit, though I had to fiddle with the color/contrast/brightness to get it to look its best.

To Toshiba’s credit, this laptop was not too loaded up with crapware; most of the pre-installed apps were Toshiba utilities that are actually sort of useful. There’s also Microsoft Works and a trial version of Norton Security and Microsoft Office.

Although there is no built-in CD/DVD burner, the laptop does include a Toshiba utility to burn recovery disc images to either an external CD/DVD drive, or to a USB flash drive. But oddly, there’s no option to burn to a larger capacity external hard drive instead. The USB flash drive option is a pain because it requires 8.3GB of space, which means that you actually need a 16GB flash drive – but at least these are starting to become reasonably priced.

My only complaints are minor: The in-built webcam isn’t that fab (poor non-adjustable white balance, poor low light performance, and an ultra-bright annoying blue LED), the shiny black finish attracts fingerprints, the battery bulges out of the base (but when it didn’t do this, it will have stuck out the back), and the screen doesn’t tilt back quite far enough for my liking sometimes.

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WEBCAM TIPS:

- For best skin tone when using the webcam, ensure the brightest thing it sees (usually the wall behind you or your shirt) is pure white or light blue. Avoid warm light colors (like beige, cream, yellow) because they’ll make your skin look blue.

- This laptop shipped with old Wi-Fi driver software, which caused problems for me after I tried webcam chatting (my Wi-Fi kept disconnecting). i discovered updated drivers on Realtek’s website which solved the matter.

Ok that’s enough of the bad side of this machine, now lets inspect the positives: It’s fast (Turion X2 dual-core + 4GB of DDR2 RAM = Pretty decent performance), the screen is rather nice for watching videos and DVD’S, The keyboard is nicely laid out, it runs Windows 7 (a really big plus IMO), and it sports an awesome integrated graphics set for some good light gaming. Overall I’m pleased with this laptop, but after a number of weeks, i spotted i’ll have bought a neater laptop from their website for less than about $40 more (Phenom X2 quad-core and 4GB of DDR3 RAM. I totally missed out). Base line: shop on the manufacturers websites first before happening Amazon. You would possibly discover a better deal there (and the next setup).

Comparison Unit – My old machine was a Toshiba 205 series laptop, still working, but working hard, purchased only two years ago, and that i’ll use that for comparison – it had a 1.7 chipset by intel inside. AS nearly as i will tell the identical software is working on both machines – except an upgrade? from Vista to 7.

Appearance – The adaptation in appearance was remarkable, old to new, and having checked out many my personal opinion is aside from a number of HP’s, they don’t get a lot more pleasing to the eyes than this machine.

Physical Size – Just like the reviews say – it’s BIG for a laptop, but that’s no reason to complain as anyone buying an 18″+ screen has to grasp it is going to be.

Fingerprints Issues – As has been mentioned – pawprints are a problem, but I’ll happily take the problem because the laptops aesthetics are really worth it.

Screen Size – It’s great for anyone needing a bigger than normal screen – for myself one can read and provides a lot of freedom of choice when coping with multiple windows.

Screen Resoloution – Superb – for the scale you may spend more and get more, but you won’t physically see the variation – unless you need to put into another big screen TV after which it’d be worth it, stressing might!

Keyboard – Firm an positive and the 1st laptop within the family one here with a severe tremor can use due to its almost full size nature (although it’s used on hunt and peck style typing – which it’s handling well for that use).

Speakers – Great for anything wanting a big cafe that’s full and has everone talking straight away – better than another laptop I’ve ever owned. Quality Audio.

Junk Software – Minimal – took just a few minutes to uninstall Norton & Google toolbar.

Speed – Faster by far than the 205. When the 205 took ~15 minutes for a given task – this laptop took around 3.

Multitasking – Haven’t managed to slow it down yet – my 205 couldn’t handle Skype and Ie simultaneously if it was asked to do anything to boot.

Full numeric keypad – a rarity on a laptop and value its weight in gold.

Seperate touch pad Audio/DVD controls (LHS) – These are a godsend, again for the disabled – just get the finger to skim the proper part and it really works – excellent idea.

Backlighted Keyboard – Not important to me, but when it’s to then you definitely read the specifications closely and choose an upgrade with it included. It has a good feel.

Webcam – i purchased a Logitech webcam (3mp) six months ago and thought that was great – it’s back inside the box! – Enough said on that subject.

Microphone – Equally nearly as good because the rather expensive Logitech (above) – this machine has really uncluttered my desk.

Battery Life – i purchased the 12 cell – it’s good – installing programs for 2 hours today on battery only and it was still at 69% – the 305 died under the identical conditions.

Plug & Play – Still haven’t found anything that doesn’t work with it, even the old Brother printer hooked in and commenced right up after inserting the disc.

Satisfaction rating: I’d give the 305 a 3 star rating after I bought it – this one gets five stars.

Hoping those interested find this review worth while, because it’s written from an amatures not geeks or gamers viewpoint – we bought ours from Beach Camera, just not through Amazon.

Now for the good stuff. It is really fast! I can run Photoshop CS5 and do anything including content aware fill with no problems. From off to ready, Windows takes about 35 seconds to load. My Dell takes about 2 minutes! It is terribly quiet and not any hotter than my Dell. I think the keypad is dumb but I guess they have to put something there because of the large screen. By the way, the screen is beautiful! I’ve played movies on this machine and they run flawlessly. I haven’t tried any BluRay movies yet but I’m sure they’d play just as well. I don’t play games so I can’t rate it at all in that area. The speakers sound very nice for a laptop. Very rich in sound with good bass.

All in all, it is a killer desktop replacement. I am disabled now and can’t get up the stairs easily to my desktop so I wanted a laptop that was close to what my desktop is. It is all that and more! I think if Toshiba changes the location of the left side multimedia buttons, does some work on the touchpad and moves the power cord back to the rear of the laptop, they would have a total winner with me!

It’s not the foremost powerful thing available, but it surely does have a dual-core 64 bit processor; nothing to sneeze at. i used to be ready to run basic Photoshop tasks with no blink, and [...] worked just fine, under Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux. After I pushed it a piece more, doing a little graphics programming, it did begin to choke a little bit, but however i used to be running a 32 bit Linux. So, although I didn’t test, I imagine it may run 3d games, but probably with any effects turned off.

So, it’s powerful enough to do actual work. i feel it’s main selling points are the entire-size keyboard and the desktop-class resolution monitor. This machine doesn’t feel cramped, but it surely’s still very light and small. i adore the HDMI and VGA outputs and 3 USB slots… this may be the ideal computer to surf the online at the couch in the future and do an office presentation at the next. Oh, and the SD card slot is an eye fixed-opener… I’ll never buy a working laptop or computer without one again.

My only beef is the trackpad is a section miniature, and perhaps a bit overly sensitive. The buttons basically make you utilize two hands. i might give this computer 4.5 stars if i may in this case. Anyways, I usually use a mouse, which makes this problem depart.

Build quality seems good… the machine is rigid, and seems like it may take abuse. Finger prints do manifest like crazy at the glossy black surface, though, so be warned.