Avoid at all cost - Toshiba refuses to support their own laptop.
Pros:
Cheap
Cons:
Slow with Vista, lack device drivers for XP, lack restore DVDs, huge and heavy.
The Bottom Line:
Avoid at all cost. Get yourself a Lenovo.
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
This is going to be the shortest review I’ve ever written.
A friend of mine bought the Toshiba Satellite A135-S4467 on a whim. For $600, this laptop has a 15.4 inch wide-screen, 160 GB drive which spins at 5400 rpm. It also has 1 GB of RAM, and a 1.6 GHz Core 2 Duo T5200 CPU. The computer also seems to have a built-in web cam, mini FireWire jack, and a media card reader.
It seems like the perfect machine. However, looks are very deceiving. The problem with this laptop is that 1) it only has 1 GB of RAM, which normally would not be a problem, except that 2) this thing comes with Windows Vista Home Edition with Aero enabled. Not good! On top of this, the laptop uses Intel’s 945GM graphics chip, which uses main memory in place of dedicated video RAM. This reduces the amount of available memory even futher.
In order to make this laptop somewhat more useful, we downgraded it to Windows XP. Boy was this a mistake. Toshiba apparently does not support Windows XP on this machine. By not support, I mean that they refuse to offer any device drivers for this laptop. This seems to be Toshiba’s general policy.
I would highly recommend that anyone who does not want to use Vista to stay away from Toshiba. They refuse to support their own computers. Compare Toshiba’s attitude to Lenovo’s – Lenovo offers all the necessary device drivers on their website. No matter if you’re using Windows XP or Linux.
