Toshiba Satellite X205-S

Customer Reviews:

Great hardware from Toshiba, not bad for Vista... [Posted on 2008-03-27]
This is the 3rd Toshiba notebook I've purchased this year. All my Toshibas are solid, fast and eye catching. I'm still not 100% sold on Vista, but this time I installed Vista SP1 first thing out of the box and didn't have any Vista issues after that. The notebook even appears to be faster after SP1. This particular notebook is quite heavy, but I didn't buy it for it's weight, I bought it for it's speed and so far I'm very impressed. Bottom line, another great product from Toshiba.

A great desktop replacement [Posted on 2008-04-02]
My wife and I bought this computer a couple of weeks ago and we could not be happier. I was looking at the sli2 when to my surprise she suggested we buy the sli4. We are not gamers, just movie and music buffs, and will keep personal items on this machine. It works great, has a beautiful picture when showing HD DVD movies on it, and the sound is equally impressive. We are both very happy with it. Watch for deals on this computer, we bought ours for hundreds less than what shows on here.

Best Bang for the Buck [Posted on 2008-04-07]
I've been runing the latest games such as COD4, Unreal Tournament 3, FFOW= frontlines Fuel of War, & they all run around 30 fps with fraps, this is a playable framerate & i wasn't expecting any less, after all it is advertised as a gaming laptop, there is some lag with these games but very minimum like a second or 2 that normal people wouldnt mind but I'm to picky when it comes to performance & i think it's due to its 5400 rpm HDD, I havent formatted the laptop as i had thought in a very begining to start off with a fresh system because it is runing quite smooth after removing all the trials; although I did notice it took a bit longer to load maps in cod4 compared to my desktop which has a 7200rpm sata drive, so replacing the hdd to a 7200rpm should speed up things.
Been using it for video editing as well, it does get a bit choppy in the timeline when you want to work with compressed files such as divx, xvid in premiere CS3, this is a known issue & unless you have a blazing laptop there isn't much you can do for it relies on your cpu the most, followed by your ram & hdd speed, changing the hdd & adding 2 gb of ram should make this laptop a great tool for standard video editing.

Size= Although this has been said before i want to share my opinion.
A 15.4 laptop looks like a todler compared to this goliath, its BIG but i find this a fare trade, after all the question always stand, you either want portability or performance? there is another comment that they compare this laptop with the mac air, its true its the complete opposite in size but it must be the complete opposite when it comes to performance, good luck trying to play cod4 in the mac air i doubt it would last to tell the story for it wouldnt be possible to cram a cooling system in 1 inch thick for heavy gaming.

my only complaint is the lid, although the red satin is very eye catching its very catching for fingerprints as well & gets scrathes easily, i had to cover it with a seethrough plastic protector to avoid scratching & the inside where the speakers are, all the plastic black area is from the same material of the ps3, if any of you have a ps3 you know what i mean, as hard as you try to be careful it gets scratched, it gets scratched only by looking at it, its insane, although these are only cosmetic flaws it counts for me, besides these points it has a great performance considering its the lowest model for the x205 line.

Awesome Laptop [Posted on 2008-04-12]
Extremely thrilled with this laptop. Great graphics. Fingerprint scanner is awesome. Full size keyboard is great. Fits great into my home network.

Some tidbits that are hard to find on the net: It comes with 2GB of ram but they are 1GB chips os if you want 4GB (max) obviously you have to sell both 1GB and buy two 2GB. I have not done that. I dropped in a 4GB thumbdrive and use it as ready boost drive.

The battery does not last long, but thats to be expected with all the hardware built in. Battery pack is a little long, maybe 6 inches.

Lots of built in software but it's mostly trial ware so there's nothing really value added there.

Speakers sound good. They boast that it has a subwoofer but as a fan of hip hop, I'm not impressed.

Built in Webcame is 1.3MP I thought it was 2MP but that doesn't really matter if you just want to see your families faces while on the road.

Even with these neg's I still give it a 4.

Also, this was my first laptop in 10 years and the last was a Toshiba Satellite Pro. It still works by the way. Anyway, I must reccomend that if you buy this laptop, run down to Staples and buy a Swiss Gear laptop backpack for 17" models. Made by the same people that make the knife. I swear this bag is AWESOME and a perfect fit for this laptop.

Best 17" yet for me [Posted on 2008-04-30]
I've owned five different 17" laptops over the last few years and this is the best yet - in spite of a few flaws. First the flaws:

-The power chord has an odd connector that just "feels" loos or odd when connecting it. Maybe just a nerve system programming issue??

-The internal keyboard is very iffy. It just misses a lot of letters when I type them.

-The computer has a fan that sporadically decides to make a rattling noise. I just don't have the patience to send it in for repair.

-The HD video system is outdated and apparently Toshiba is doing nothing for us in spite of this. This one is almost frustrating enough to bring it down to three stars.

The positive aspects ar many, including:

-Super fast video. The dual video SLI with 512 MB of video memory runs even modern games with beautiful graphics.

-Dual hard drives. Great for running the virtual machines I run for the technical training classes I teach. If you don't know what virtual machines are, don't worry. This feature just gives you better drive performance.

-The screen is beautiful. I'm not referencing the graphics card here, but the actual screen display.

-For a laptop, the sound is the best I've had yet. I can watch a movie on it in my hotel room from across the room and the sound is clear and even has some bass to it with the subwoofer.

Now, with the flaws, you're probably wondering why I gave it four stars. Simple... the last positive: I can actually stretch this laptop to about 100 minutes on battery on a plane. I've never been able to do this with any other 17" I've owned.

Hope this helps.

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