|
I purchased an additional 1 GB of RAM and had it installed. I bought it on sale from Best Buy for 400 dollars and sold it yesterday for 300 dollars on craigslist because people like the duo core that works well and runs itunes, bf2, bf1942, MS Word and Autocad like a charm. and hrs. I bought this computer in January 2008 and sold it yesterday-June 2009. like I did and then automatically shuts off so invest in a cooling fan. I used it during two years of college and it went through major abuse but it held in there playing games, itunes, and all sorts of downloads. Heat is the enemy of all electrical components.
Let me tell you that I use and abuse computers and this one held out. Remove it and back up your sensitive data on an external hard drive and run Vista on minimal settings and it will run super fast.Also: it over heats if you keep it on a blanket or a table and run it for hrs. I'm no apple wiz but after blaming my Toshiba for not detecting my ipod I began to suspect my firewire and bought a new one from Apple and the itunes loaded in a sec.One Note:For the laptop and technically challenged - Anti-Virus software and IE8 bog down your system. The major obstacle you will have is getting Vista to work properly. Trust me, often it is just the apple firewire cable.
It came with a duo core processor and 1 gb of Ram. And if you are having problems with your ipod you need to update itunes or replace the firewire cable. After this it works like a charm. This computer is great for the price. To get it going you have to reduce Vista to minimal settings and take off all the extra malware that it comes with.
It's now running on 1.5 GB ram. It doesn't have camera nor microphone on it.
So I am very satisfied with this Toshiba product. Besides that the Toshiba satellite a205-s5804 is a reliable laptop.
I bought this laptop from somewhere else, and I've been using it for 14 months non stop for video application, email, word processing and so on so far so good for it doesn't crash once. Very good image quality, good hand rest but I only give it 4 stars it lacks usb ;port and the ROM drive is not superior.
Highly recommend it. the only upgrade I made is with the ram.
The sound on this baby is the top, it has good internet reception both wired or wireless.
It's also easy (and pretty cheap) to upgrade if you just buy the RAM separately. This laptop is a great value for basic computer needs. It's quick and reliable.
The only way to get the wireless to work is to use a Windows driver wrapper (didn't work on my distro), or compile your own patched driver. I'm not going to try it.All in all, you get what you pay for. The 1GB that it comes with really doesn't cut it, especially if you're going to run Vista on it. Not just in sleep mode, even when completely powered down. I've had this laptop for around 18 months, and it is sufficient for what I use it for.
Let the machine sit for a couple days and the battery is dead without fail. Yes, that's right -- internal USB. I know there was a BIOS issue with the A105 that did this, but the A205s appear to be notorious for bricking during a BIOS flash. Toshiba apparently cut a bunch of corners to hit their price point on this one, so this is likely the last Toshiba I'll buy. Not a novice problem to solve. Second, the power management is flaky.
If you're looking for a primary system though, I'd look someplace else. This is unsupported in linux by Realtek, and the 8187 driver DOES NOT work with this card. I didn't have Vista on it long enough verify whether it's an issue there as well, but the laptop consumes power even when off. If you do purchase one, the first thing you should do is stick another GB of RAM in it. Also, the wifi switch on the case is apparently software driven and doesn't function in linux (it's always on). It's a proprietary design and is apparently specific to this laptop.
I currently have Ubuntu 8.04 installed, and ran into 2 issues that anyone who intends to run a Linux laptop should be aware of.First, the wifi card is an internal USB RTL8187b. This also means that you can't just replace the wifi card with a supported chipset to fix the problem.
The charger also falls out easily(as it did with the original charger as well). Not to mention I've already spent over 100$ trying to find out what's wrong with this thing. But after less than a year, now it's having some major problems.
I think it's actually that piece that you connect the charger into on the computer. Far too many problems for being less than a year old. And if it is, I have no idea how to fix that.
This computer was okay for me at first. I now have to by a new charger for it, but I don't think that's going to be the problem either as the charger is managing to make the laptop stay on. Not to mention, it's running Vista(granted, sadly, all computers are nowadays).
It holds a charge with the new charger I had to buy(the old one broke easily) but it will not charge itself. I had to buy a new battery for it, but it turns out that wasn't the problem.
|
