Opinions of Toshiba laptops needed

[slugcatcher]

I'm looking at getting my first laptop. I'm looking at the Toshiba A505-S6965. Does anyone have any good or bad experiences with Toshibas they're willing to share? I hear they have an overheating issue but it's due to dust ingestion from what I've found on the net.

[mtnbkr]

I haven't had any experience with the newer ones (past 7-8 years), but the ones made in the 90s and early 2000s were pretty bulletproof.  Back then, I would take a Toshiba over an IBM or Compaq any day.

FWIW, if your laptop has an access panel for the CPU heatsink, you can remove and clean them with compressed air.  I do that periodically with my Dell Inspiron.  I figured this out when it became so clogged that the fan was running full speed all the time and the desk area beneath the CPU was hot. 

Chris

[Nick1911]

My wife has a Toshiba laptop from around 2004.

It still runs great.  I accidentally broke a hinge, but had it replaced under warranty.

Overall, It's been a fantastic machine.

[AJ Dual]

I'm on Mrs. Dual's Satellite L355D, which is pretty impressive for being only $399.

It's not very portable, It's more of a desktop replacement unit, with a 17" display. The keyboard is offset to the side a bit, because the large display laptops have room for a numeric keypad.

Mrs. Dual is heavily into scanning, and Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, and she is finding that heavy image processing is sluggish, but that would be the case for most any laptop. And with the march of technology and chips, it does still get the job done.

Having experienced the old Satellites from the 90's, and this one here, I think it's a perfectly adequate machine.

[mgdavis]

I have a Toshiba A215-S7462. The Toshiba Flashcards program is complete crap that freezes almost every session, and it definitely runs hot. Also, for some unknown reason, it occasionally black-screen crashes while viewing Youtube. Other than that (and frakking [i[Vista[/i]) it has been working pretty well for me.

[K Frame]

Castle Key has a Toshiba that is gov't issued. He uses it hard and it doesn't seem that it's given him any problems so far.

I'm debating getting a laptop or a netbook right now... Laptop is winning because a low-end laptop is a lot more capable than a Netbook and about the same money.

[BrokenPaw]

BrokenMa has a Toshiba Qosmio F45-AV411.  It runs along quite happily; the only issue it's had was Vista's fault, not the machine's, and a scorched-earth, reinstall-on-a-fresh-drive approach sorted that out pretty quickly.

One thing about heat:  BrokenMa's doesn't like to have anything covering its keyboard (she tends to use it with an external ergonomic keyboard plugged in, when she's at her desk, and sometimes she's put papers over the native keyboard).  It seems that that causes enough heat retention that the lappy will sometimes shut down unexpectedly.

Word to the wise when buying any new system with an OS (Ok, with Windows) pre-installed:  You might wish to do a fresh OS install as the very first thing you do; most vendors put about forty hundred useless bundled pieces of crappy software on their install images, and it's easier to just reinstall the OS fresh than it is to try and get all that crap uninstalled.

-BP

[Jocassee]

I used to sell laptops in retail. All laptops are prone to failure no matter what the brand. Get a warranty/service agreement. Only brands I steer people away from are sony (overpriced) and Acer (not well made). HP, Dell are about the same. Go with the best bang for the buck make sure you know what you're getting. It's hard to be in sales and be completely honest.

[mellestad]

We use Toshiba laptops at the company I work for.  I wouldn't say they are better than other laptops, but they certainly are not any worse.  Nothing wrong with them (although they do come with crummy software, Toshiba software and utilities tend to be poor, in my experience).

But they are fairly cheap and are typically good quality.  I would not hesitate to recommend the brand.