Toshiba Satellite X205-SLI

Customer Reviews:

Great Laptop for Gamers and Road Warriors who spend 150 nights in hotels or more each year [Posted on 2007-11-28]
Toshiba Satellite X205-SLI3 17" Notebook PC (Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7500, 2 GB RAM, 320 GB Hard Drive, Vista Premium)
This is a Great Laptop and the memory performance is 512 +250 Turbo as Toshiba specifies. I felt I needed to counter the reviewer before me who's memory figures are inaccurate. If you see Mr. Perez's commnet to the one star review; he explains it very well; why the original review is inaccuarte. I would add a few points: When I rec'd my x205 from Amamzon; I checked my computer and it shows 1 Gg of system RAM and not 2. That is because windows 32 and 64 bit has to allocate memory rows from the system to cover all the ram whether it's on a Video card or elsewhere. So windows uses 1 GB to cover the memory for video and some other devices. Also when you examine the amount of video memory avaiable on the video adapter; it is 1.5Gb. Mr. Perez is correct; windows can only see one Video Card; but if you go to INvidia's website and read by definition Sli, means you can have 2 cards each with 256 vram. You have to go into Graphics to enable the second one when you play a game; and windows still measures one; but in system information under Display properties it shows 2 cards on 2 separate IRQs when SLi is enabled. Toshiba assumes people buying this laptop would likely know these things; or they would spend less. When you read reviews comparing this laptop to other extreme gamer laptops; costing $500 to $1000 more; this is a tremendous value; with only a slight performance hit from the most extreme. NVidia clearly shows that 2 video cards outperform 1 card; and more memeory and faster CPUs are only slight perfromance enhancers. Fianlly the 205-sli3 is fully spec'd at a true HDDVD Resolution and meets all hardware requirements and exceeds them to play HDDVD movies. The screen is amazing! The CPU is the newer Santa Rosa chipset; and the HDDrives are a respectable 5400RPM considering heat and power requirements. This is one super laptop and Amazon is a great trustworthy Company with a great price! Comes with the latest Digital USB TV tuner also; and fantastic sound! And Toshiba's extended warranty is a really fair price. You will not be disappointed!

Great computer [Posted on 2008-01-01]
It was really simple to set up and is easy to use. The graphics are awesome and I love having the number pad.

AWESOME POWER AND PERFORMANCE!!! [Posted on 2008-01-02]
I purchased the Toshiba Satellite X205-SLI1 17" Notebook PC (Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7250, 2 GB RAM, Dual 120 GB Hard Drives, Vista Premium) as a Christmas gift to myself. I am not a gamer and I'm not using this notebook computer for gaming, online or otherwise, but I do a lot of graphics art, so the powerful graphics cards are great. The SLI1 definitely has enough processor speed and RAM horsepower to move enormous files and render some huge-GB photos. Simply, this computer is incredible. I had only one problem - the DVD drive disappeared - which I fixed by re-installing Picasa and rebooting. (I don't know why Picasa fixed it, but it did, and I've seen a couple online posts to this effect.) I spent eight hours uninstalling crapware, defragging the C:/ drive, and then installing my own third-party software (such as Office 2007, Photoshop, AVG, Spybot, ccleaner, and Ad-Aware) and I did not encounter a single problem or compatibility issue, either with the SLI1 or Windows Vista Premium. I also spent a lot of time tweaking Vista and hacking the registry to customize this computer for increased speed and performance and stability, and truthfully I expected to encounter a few problems. But I did not have any trouble!!! This notebook is phenomenal, Vista is quick and stable, everything can be tweaked, performance and response times are fast, and all of my software runs on it. The screen is bright and lustrous. The keyboard is great for typists, and the number pad is a blessing. The sound is better than average for a notebook computer. I could not imagine being more pleased with my purchase. (For all you gamers looking at this computer, I wish that I could help out, but I just don't game, but if you enable the SLI1 technology and both NVIDIA cards - yes, there are two - and invest in 4 GB of RAM, this machine would truly rock!) For everyone else, I hope this review helps you.

Toshiba Satellite X205-SLI1 [Posted on 2008-01-23]
Only annoying factor so far is that the battery life remaining is shown only as a percentage of battery life, no indication of hours and minutes remaining.

Also facility for ripping CDs is much slower than my old Toshiba Tecra. My old Toshiba can rip 2 CDs for every 1 CD in this new machine.

Great Value!!! [Posted on 2008-03-27]
Pros:
-The laptop is actually cheap for the price you pay, only a few other laptops can compare to this one in terms of power, however, they are more expensive.
-Comes with a good graphics card, Nvidia SLI Dual Geforce 8600M GT, each with 256mb of VRAM.(someone stated that the graphics card only contains 256mb total, however, you must turn SLI-mode on in order to take advantage of both graphics cards. SLI-mode is off by default and the system will use the total 767mb from the hard disk memory when necessary.
-Comes with a bright 17 inch display
-More than decent speakers for a laptop.
-Plenty of ports, including an HDMI output.
-Great vents, doesn't get as hot as some laptops I've used.
-Full keyboard with number pad.
-HD-DVD drive to watch HD movies.
-Built in camera and mic.
-Built in memory-stick, SD slot.
-Fingerprint reader for extra security (I never used this feature)

Cons:
-HD-DVD drive, since HD-DVD lost the format war and is going to be useless by the end of the year. Also, the drive didn't play some regular dvd movies.
- Windows Vista installed, some may complain that Windows Vista is not as stable as XP, and it isn't backwards compatible with some XP software programs. I have run into many installation programs when I tried to install some very important software into this laptop, because they weren't Vista compatable. However, I have successfully installed a majority of them regardless. I have successfully installed and run programs such as; Adobe CS2 programs, Autodesk Maya 8.5, and Avid Xpress Pro, however each of them had some sort of work around, which isn't actually ideal.
- Only comes in 1 color/design, and the design is a hit or miss, not as attractive as other high-end laptops.
- Battery life doesn't last very long, however, this laptop is supposed to be a desktop replacement and isn't meant to be run on battery.
- You can make/get a more powerful desktop for the same price.
- It's quite heavy for a laptop.
- Comes pre-installed with a ton of garbage software.

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