Toshiba Satellite A205-S5867 15.4-inch Laptop (1.86 GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core T2390 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, DVD Drive, Vista Premium) | List Price: $599.99
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Brand: Toshiba
Binding: Personal Computers
Warranty: 1 year warranty
Features: - 15.4-inch (Diagonal) TruBrite TFT Widescreen Display at 1280 x 800 Native Resolution
- 1.86 GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core Processor T2390 with 1 MB L2 Cache
- 1024 MB PC5300 DDR2 SDRAM, 160 GB (5400 RPM) Hard Drive (SATA), Mobile Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 with 8 MB-256 MB Dynamically Allocated Shared Graphics Memory
- DVD SuperMulti (+/-R Double Layer) Drive, Atheros 802.11b/g Wireless LAN
- Windows Vista Home Premium, dims in inches: 10.6 (W) x 14.3 (L) x 1.32 (H), 10.5 lbs approx.
Great laptop for cost-conscious, undemanding users [Posted on 2008-08-25]
I have the A215, it seems to be identical to the A205 except the A215 has less hard drive memory and has a AMD processor so it might be helpful to those looking to buy the A205.
Vista: I was nervous about Vista because like everyone else I have heard bad things. Fortunatley I have not have any major problems with Vista. I was annoyed by the infamous "Cancel or Allow" but that can be shut off. I think if you are buying a pc with pre-installed Vista you will not have as many gripes as those upgrading to Vista.
Physical dimensions: I'm very happy with the layout of my laptop. I like the keyboard and I like that at the very front are buttons for internet, beats clicking. The sound, microphone jack and volume wheel are at the front. I personally like this, especially the sound wheel because my last laptop had two buttons for volume which was a pain pressing all the time. The casing actually seems pretty fragile, plastic like. No problem for me because I handle it like a baby but if perhaps not for everyone.
Problems: There was plenty of bloatware by Toshiba but that was easy to delete. My biggest problems was this weird Toshiba program where they have this tabs at the top that was unneccessary and very annoying. I managed to delete this but was stressful. Also stressful was when I downloaded an update to my Wireless software from Windows Update and it stopped working. I would advise to be very careful updating from Windows Update, especially your wireless card. Also a problem I avoided thanks to reading other Amazon reviewers was this (or others I forget) Toshiba Laptop has a problem where it shuts down for no reason. It turns out that's because the CPU needs to be set to 100%. So go to power options and set it at 100% no matter the conditions (plugged in, batter mode). I forget the specifics but if you search around Amazon you'll find the reviews that specifically address this problem. Also keep in mind this problem is what hurt the average star rating. So the star ratings can be deceiving.
Battery Life: The one gripe I have about my laptop right now is battery life. It is absolutley pathetic. The battery indicator can be deceiving because it reads 2 hrs but I swear it was an hour at most and I don't watch that many movies, (the cd drives sucks up power) just web browse. Fortunatley I don't take my laptop out much but it's still very annoying. I'd recommend buying extra batteries if you're going to take it out a lot.
Conclusions: This was a perfect laptop for me and I do not have any regrests buying it. I only use it for web browing, watching dvds, photoshopping, playing Madden, Google Earth, basic things like that so if you need a lot of power this might not be for you. I would say 1GB of ram is plenty for anything you want to do online as long as you don't run too many programs at once. The price is also very reasonable. One last thing I would recommend is purchase (not a free one) an antivirus program for this and any other windows computer because Vista's security will not be enough. It's worth paying to not get viruses.
Hope this review helped, and good luck buying your laptop!
Fantastic little laptop [Posted on 2008-09-21]
This is a great laptop for our business. We use it for Quickbooks, email and the internet. It was difficult to "downgrade" to Windows XP (you need serial ATA drivers) but after that it's been a fast, powerful addition to our computer family. The one drawback we had was the lack of a parallel port (printer port) but we simply bought a USB printer and now things are fine.
I don't think you'll find a better laptop in the under 700.00 range anywere. Dual core is a plus.
This laptop is great!! [Posted on 2008-09-25]
So far so good. This laptop is meeting all my expectations. Delivery is fast and very efficient. I would recommend buying this product everytime.
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