Great power its size, if it's not broken
Written: Apr 27 '05 (Updated Dec 06 '05)
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Pros: Very powerful for its size, good gaming, small and light.
Cons: Gets very hot, battery life, components fail and reliability is in question.
The Bottom Line: No other laptop on the market can match the specifications (currently) for it's given size and weight. However, it can give you problems if and when components start to fail.
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| v8ramair's Full Review: Toshiba Tecra M3 (PTM30U0GX018) PC Notebook |
I bought this laptop for mainly two purposes: gaming and portability. It's a relatively light, small, and thin laptop, which makes it very portable. It weighs about 5 lbs, and is a bit thinner than my work laptop, a Compaq Presario 2100.
My configuration is as follows: Pentium M 2.0 GHZ, 533 FSB, 1 GB RAM, 60 GB 7200 RPM HDD, Geforce 6600 Go 128 video, DVD writer, bluetooth, 14.1" screen.
Gaming and graphics:
"Halo" can run at 1024x768, with all the details turned to the highest settings. In addition, 3DMark2005 shows a score of 1350-1500 depending on the drivers used. However, since the Geforce 6600 Go is relatively new, there are very few drivers out for it. Thus, the current drivers have their share of bugs, which include artifacts and unexpected slow-downs for no reason. Once in a while, a graphics intense game may, all of a sudden, start running very slowly. You have to restart the program or the OS in order to get back to normal speed. I am unaware of what is causing this problem, and hope the next set of Forceware drivers will fix this.
One last concern with the graphics is that, according to 3DMark2005, the 6600 is clocked at 225 MHZ core/400 MHZ memory. According to some sites, the 6600 Go is clocked at 300/600 to 350/700, depending on which one you get. I'm trying to figure out why is it clocked substantially lower than those settings. It could be due to battery life or another reason I have yet to figure out.
Standard applications:
This laptop is very powerful for standard applications. Word processing and similar tools are absolutely no problem to this laptop. It has given the "blue screen of death" once in 3 weeks, which may have been a "freak" occurrence.
Toshiba has good built-in utilities such that make wireless connections, BIOS settings, and power properties easy to setup and/or change.
Portability and feel of the laptop:
This laptop, as mentioned earlier, is very easy to carry around. It weighs about 5 lbs, and is much smaller than most 15.4" and 17" laptops.
The keyboard is what you would expect of most laptops. The mouse options include a nice touchpad and "eraser" pointer type mouse.
The bottom of the laptop normally stays decently cool, but gets extremely hot when using intense applications, such as heavy gaming. The AC power adapter also gets very hot, which worries me at times. I make sure to place the laptop on a table and the adapter in a safe place due to this problem.
Battery life:
The battery life is decent, however, a 12 cell and/or secondary battery is recommended. The standard battery is adequate, but does not last much long. Even setting the CPU to a lower clock speed, and the screen to a dimmer setting, the battery will maybe last a couple hours. Obviously, the more intense application, the shorter the battery life.
External features/ports:
This laptop comes with a standard PCMCIA slot, 1394 Firewire port, 2 USB ports, microphone, headphone, VGA, parallel, RJ-11 (phone), RJ-45 (network), infrared. Some of these may depend on the configuration of your custom laptop.
--- UPDATE 6 MONTHS LATER ---
Well, I thought this laptop was one of the best systems money can buy. But I have had nothing but trouble since my initial review. The AC adapter failed within 1 month. Then a month later, the motherboard died. The CPU fan also broke, which caused the whole system to overheat. Then, the keyboard and mouse quit working, which was due to a loose connection. And as of right now, the "new" AC adapter has failed again. In owning this laptop for 6 months, I've had it down for repair for roughly 1 month, which is completely unacceptable. I have never dropped or abused this PC, and take care of it, as it was a near $3000 investment. So I'm not quite sure of the cause of all these problems. It still runs great when it is functioning properly, however, that is the case only about 1/6 of the time.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 2640.00
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 14 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: SuperDisk
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
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Epinions.com ID:
v8ramair
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Reviews written: 2
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