Last week [fluggart.com], I mentioned that we replaced Heimlich's laptop. What we bought was a TOSHIBA Satellite A205-S5871 laptop [newegg.com]. The description on Newegg has the full system specs and lots of pictures. We ended up buying it from Sears for $100 less than the price at Newegg (!), and it came with a case, a USB hub, and a mouse with retractable cord.
For all of the computer geeks out there, the vital specs are:
- Intel Pentium dual-core T2390(1.86GHz)
- 2GB DDR2 667 RAM
- 160GB HDD
- 15.4" WXGA screen (1280x800)
Our initial experiences with the machine have all been positive. The touchpad has a sufficient recess so that you don't touch it inadvertently while typing. The screen is huge and bright, the keyboard is comfortable (and has a large backspace key), there are 4 USB ports on the sides, and the system is plenty responsive.
A common problem that used to happen with computers was that the hard drive would come with a single partition, and there wasn't much you could do about that because you only received recovery disks. So, unless you knew your way around a Linux live-CD, there weren't really many options you could use to repartition the hard drive into a system partition and a data partition (vital for the annual reinstalls that I perform). The Toshiba recovery disks that came with this unit actually allow you to change the partition table, so that you can do this yourself. I suspect that this is a standard feature nowadays, but this is the first computer we have bought in 4 years.
So far, we're really happy with Toshiba.
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