ravenbow

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The lightest notebook with optical drive in the market

Apr 8, 2008

Rating: 9 out of 10 (Spectacular)
Pros: Fully functional super light notebook
Cons: Windows Vista
Opinion:
Having owned the classic Toshiba T1000 in the early-90's and having gone through an Acer, Dell and Twinhead I have come full circle and gotten the R500. Lugging a 2.5 kg Dell through an airport is no joke.

It was a choice between a UMPC (Asus Eee), Sony TZ or this. The initial impression was that it was quite flimsy, but the CD drive and screen has survived beng assaulted by my 3 yr old son. There is a Youtube video out there showing how much damage it can take. The battery is enough for a 5 hour plane flight on "power save" mode (ie no CD). The finger recognition software actually works. It does get very hot and one needs to balance it so that the vent is not blocked by your leg.

Sony's keyboard is better - but a full sized keyboard that works beats the cramp-inducing Eee keyboard. The 12 vs 10 in of the r500 was the clincer between the TZ and R500. The increase in size was not sacrificed for weight.

Only major downside is the pre-installed Vista - it takes longer to boot up than it is to wake up a grumpy teenager on a weekend and DO NOT touch it while it is booting else it will just hang there drawing pretty rainbow circles forever. Vista also hijacks 20 Mb of hardrive space in case it crashes fatally - why dont they try making something which works in the first place. Effective hard drive space is ~ 70 Gb. Can someone in Toshiba please leave the hard drive alone ?