I have a very similar Toshiba model  (A305-S6898) of this laptop for just under two months and I love it! I purchased mine at Best Buy on sale for $100.00 more (was normally $879.00) and would jump for it again at the same price. At $679.00 I don’t see how you could go wrong. It has handled everything I have thrown at it (though for up to the minute high intensity 3D games I imagine it would get fairly hot and not keep up with a $4000.00 powerhouse – see video comment below).

Beautifully designed; sturdy; no flimsiness of the screen or keyboard; much better speakers than most laptops (though if you really love music I would still use high quality external speakers); multitasks with no problem; a very crisp, bright display with no glare; the Draft-N Wi-Fi (802.11b/g/n) picks up my network anywhere in the house – plus my next door neighbor’s network and a house two houses down the street, though at low quality. The computer speaks quality of design like many Toshiba computers.

I cannot really talk about video fairly as my laptop has an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3470 video card, not the Intel GMA 4500MHD integrated chip. With 1750 MB total available memory in the integrated chip, I doubt you would see much difference. I also don’t use the built-in webcam or mic for voice & video calling, again no comment.

Like everyone says in reviews of this laptop – that smooth, high-gloss, sleek surface picks up fingerprints when you just walk by. It does not bother me much and I kind of like rubbing it down with the enclosed jeweler’s cloth. Not much different than polishing your first new car, but some people will go crazy over the prints.

The one thing that does bother me is the up/down (right-side edge) – left/right (bottom edge) scrolling feature of the touch pad. I invariably touch these edges by accident and find my web page or word document has scrolled five pages down and across. Though probably not a feature of just this laptop, this is my first encounter with this feature and I have not yet found a way to shut it off.

I don’t find that the unit gets hot at all. Really it stays fairly cool except in one area – the touch-pad. That area seems to collect a fair amount of heat. You can always us a mouse if it bothers you. Unlike the other review, my in-line charger gets warm, but not hot.

All that said, this is overall a desktop replacement unit. It is well built and slightly heavy. An hour directly on my lap does begin to become uncomfortable. Like said before, it sucks juice. But I really don’t carry it many places without the charger, so for me it is not much of an issue. I love this laptop.

A word of warning, not about the machine, but Windows 64-bit version of Vista Home Premium. The 64-bit is for better performance and to use all of that 4 GB RAM. Nice. But 64-bit does not always play nice with 32-bit programs (right now about 85% to 90% of the programs out there). The 64-bit version will become more popular as time goes on (like the old 16-bit going to 32-bit), but right now only a few firewalls, anti-virus and other select programs can handle 64-bit. If you know what to do, you can sometimes coax some 32-bit programs to work and some work fine anyway, but beware just transferring your current programs from your 32-bit computer to this one. You will probably need a few extra dollars for newer versions or different programs.

Popularity: -0% [?]