After having previous good experiences with Toshiba laptops in the past, I purchased the 3000-S353 several months ago, hoping that Toshiba would continue its history of good products for inexpensive prices. What I received was far below my expectations quality-wise, but is overall a decent machine.

For its price at the time, this laptop came loaded with features: 2 USB ports, an I.Link port, infrared, a 14.1" screen and a DVD drive.

It ran at optimum just out of the box, despite having very few installed programs, and aside from having a single pixel out on the screen ran perfectly for several months. It was very easy to install and upgrade RAM, as well as to switch between modular bay components (the floppy and DVD drive).

It wasn't until several months later that the first in a long line of problems began to crop up:

Headphone Jack - The ring that secures the headphone jack/stereo output to the laptop broke first, and because the soundcard is wired into the motherboard, Toshiba refused to replace it. As a result, the audio out feature on the laptop become unusable. Add that to the fact that the speakers are of low quality and located at an inconvenient place, it became very hard to do anything relating to audio with it.

Screen - I had several problems with the screen. The machine shipped with a pixel out, which Toshiba refused to replace until four others went out as well. It also suffered some sort of hardware malfunction that turns the screen off when it's touched in a certain place and will not turn it back on until the machine is fully cooled.

Servicing - Though Toshiba has many service centers, and while the laptop is under warranty all service is free, there was a good deal of difficulty actually attaining a replacement screen for my laptop. Their service centers, while friendly and somewhat helpful, appear to draw from cheap, easily-breakable or refurbished parts instead of new ones, resulting in unavoidable collateral damage.

Upgrading - The Toshiba website has some resources for upgrading laptops beyond their installed operating system, including drivers for all included peripherials and alternate copies of installed software. However, not all of this works, and upon upgrading to Windows 2000, I discovered that the processor was, in fact, a PIII 700 that had software to mimic a 900's performance.

Overall, the machine does offer many features that are not found on other systems. However, it does suffer from a multitude of hardware-related problems, which are definate drawbacks to any non-computer literate person.

Recommended: No

Amount Paid (US$): 1500
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 801-900
Screen Size: 14
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20