I recently purchased the Toshiba Satellite P105-S9339 laptop. It came preinstalled with Vista Ultimate. Being that I’m a self proclaimed “power-user” the first thing I do after powering on a new PC for the first time is format the hard drive and reinstall the OS. There are several reasons why I do this.
- There is a ton of useless trialware that comes preinstalled that I will never use.
- The PC manufacture brands the OS and web browser and makes claims such as “IE7 optimized by Comcast” – This scares me. What exactly did they do to “optimize” my browser?
- The PC manufacture installs “helpful utilities” that do nothing more than use system resources unnecessarily. (Toshiba’s Config-Free is a joke)
- The PC manufacture often creates a partition on the hard drive to assist in the recovery process in case the PC needs to be recovered. This is a waste of valuable hard drive space. When I reformat I delete this partition.
- I like the warm fuzzy feeling obtained by knowing there is a clean install of windows.
- I can ensure that all of the latest drivers are installed for my hardware by visiting the respective websites. The driver CD that ships with new PC’s is most likely outdated. Drivers are constantly being updated so I leave the CD in its shrink wrap and go online for all the latest drivers.
This process is a lengthy one but it’s well worth the time investment. It makes the PC run as smooth as a baby’s behind.
I only have a few minor complaints:
- The fan drives me crazy. It kicks in 3-4 times a minute, stays on in high RPM for less then a second, then goes off. There is a setting in the BIOS to switch the fan to silent mode but I hesitate to use it because then I’ll take a hit on performance. Other people have this same complaint with the fan too.
- And as long as I’m complaining, the other issue with I’ve found is that the laptop loses sound upon wake up. Actually the sound thing is a known issue with Vista which I’ve blogged about in my post surrounding my love/hate relationship with Vista.
- Although the harddrive is 200 gigabytes it runs at a painfully slow 4200 rpm. I’ll be upgrading that to the super speedy 160 gigabyte Seagate Momentus 7200.2 drive as soon as its available. Out of the box Vista rates my laptop at a 4.2 which is pretty good. The hard drive is the weakest link.
- The shift key on the right side of the keyboard is too small. It’s the same size as the letter keys. So when I am using this laptop at home I plug in my Microsoft Digital Media Pro USB keyboard.
I love speed (Core 2 Duo 2.0 T7200 CPU), the 2 Gigs of ram, the awesome 7900GS video card with 256 dedicated ram, the 17″ widescreen, the built-in Bluetooth, and the built-in fingerprint reader.
Overall I am satisfied with this laptop. For the price no other laptop on the market compares to it’s performance and overall value.
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