tomazbodner

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Worst pile of rubbish ever purchased

Mar 21, 2008

Rating: 2 out of 10 (Terrible)
Pros: silver painted keyboard
Cons: terrible battery life, useless webcam, worst keyboard ever used
Opinion:
I guess the guy who wrote the previous review just saw notebook in the store but never used it.

Well I had bad luck for falling for Toshiba Portege line reputation, which once (long ago) used to be the best notebooks out there.

Well this one is a lemon. Whatever they advertise it as, it doesn't deliver.

I find it amazing that Toshiba brings out a notebook that with maximum power saving battery management achieves a staggering 1 hour and 45 minutes of autonomy.

For that all important video conferences you'll be happy to hear, that most of the time webcam won't cooperate and you'll be enjoying all these "video device error" messages, and if you actually manage to bring it to work, you'll be absolutely stunned by it's noisy, dark, nearly unrecognizable image. If you don't know what I mean, take your TV, turn the brightness to nearly zero, then unplug the antenna... you'll be pretty close.

And this notebook is likely only for very feminine users that have extremely soft fingers, and any pressure on the keys bends the whole keyboard like it was made out of chewing gum with no support underneath. Sometimes I'm afraid the guys of the notebook would fly out at the bottom if I press any button too hard...

The performance is another highly impressive thing about this jewel of engineering. Putting it aside SZ series of Sony Vaio with basically identical specs (OK, Vaio is 0.2 GHz faster and comes with hybrid hard disk drive), brings back the memories of that old Apple advertisements with snail carrying a Pentium II from Intel, and a motorbike with PowerPC chip putting it on fire when overtaking... The difference, in other words, is enormous. Sony's at least 50% if not 100% faster in Stamina mode than this junk is in full performance mode. And they both came with Vista, to be fair in comparing, though M600 comes with Vista Basic, while Sony comes with Business version, but I am unaware of any huge speed differences between the two.

So all in all, unless you get sold on the sexy white cover (or blue/black metallic glossy paint) on the outside and silver sprayed keyboard on the inside and all the technical wobble that goes with their marketing (like 1.89 kg, though it feels much heavier compared to Sony SZ or Asus W3, maybe cause it looks thicker), you should stay as far away from this pile of rubbish as possible... Actually, after "you should" kind of summarizes my best advice to you to date...