Mamma Mio, This is one tasty meatball!
Written: Jan 03 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Brite Display, Lots of storage, Style, Slot loading DVD
Cons: Batt Life=Short, It's large, sometimes freezes.
The Bottom Line: Buy it. If you can afford it. You will not be sorry. It's just cool.
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| castrostreet's Full Review: Toshiba Qosmioâ„¢ G25-AV513 (PQG20U-10K00E) PC Not... |
I know I should not covet thy neighbors Toshiba, but what if it's my roommate's? Because for the past two weeks I have been doing more than covet his new Christmas Present. The G25-AV513 Toshiba Qosmio (coz-me-O)is one of the hottest notebook computers of the year according to the critics. I tend to agree, for the most part.
The purchase process:
Couldn't have been simpler. Roommate relied on me to help him choose a good gaming notebook. I initially went for an Alienware. That completely self destructed due to their complete incompetence(Still waiting for a refund and that is another epinion). This time I bought online at Circuit City with a special "5 hour only rebate" I got it just as the rebate was about to end! (Then they promptly reset it for another "5 Hour Only Rebate"!!) Whatever it was a good deal. $2,499 minus $350 rebate. So I chose to pick it up in store. It took 5 minutes to pick it up.
Unpacking:
At home we broke the seal and delved into the packaging. This notebook is packaged well and reminded me of an Apple product with all the attention to detail in packaging. There is the main unit wrapped in a nice protective bag with a zipper. It also comes with a black, Toshiba logo polishing cloth to keep the fingerprints off the slick keyboard. We plugged it in and the blue lights illuminated. Very cool. Turned it on and it LIT UP THE ROOM. My god how many friggin lumens does that screen put out. You could blind someone. It's the best, brightest screen I've ever seen. You actually have to turn it down if you are using it for a long time as you won't be able to see your TV set.
First Thoughts:
The Bluetooth is fussy and hard to figure out. Much more difficult that with a Mac. They actually advise you not to run the bluetooth and the Wi-Fi at the same time. Why? I don't know. All the Mac's do it without issues. Still have not figured out the bluetooth. The Wi-Fi, now that was easy. There is a little Toshiba utility that puts all the Wi-Fi signals into a nice visual appearing as sattelites rotating around you, the closer the sattelite, the stronger the source. Click on a sattelite and all the Wi-Fi data comes up, what is the SSID, What kind of network, etc. Everyone in our building has Wi-Fi so we just found our little sattelite and logged right in. Great reception, never drops the signal.
The test.
Gaming we started out with Sim City 4 with Rush Hour expansion pack. Trouble from the get go. When in game and you switch out then go back to game. All the clouds and waves become static. This would be a video driver issue. Go on to NVidia to download latest driver. No updated driver available. I thought maybe it was because it was too new but they were already touting this video card's replacement on the site. So he has to live with that I guess.
Next up was RCT3. That seemed to run fine, no glitches. He does not do doom or quake or any of those games, more into simulations so I can't speak for performance other than those.
The machine has locked up a few times. At first he was leaving it on 24-7 like he used to do with his Dell. I told him to shut it down at night and since then not so many lock ups. It also may have to do with a number of Toshiba widgets that load during boot. I turned a few off and may turn a few more off later. Some are tricky to uninstall or disable. But to get the true power of this notebook it's better not to have all that junk running in the background.
Storage:
Can you say Dual 60Gig HD's? Yes siree you can run a RAID on a notebook! And they even include software to run a RAID. But I'll take my chances and the extra drive for more games and crap thank you. But for you skittish types out there go ahead and have a mirror image of your data. Plus you get slot readers for all the most popular digital media cards on the market. And.... wait for it... wait for it... YES! A SLOT LOADING CD/DVD-R !! Ok it's not as smooth as the Powerbook slot loading drive. It kinda sucks the discs in with a clunk. But do any of your PC friends have slot loading drives on their win-notebooks? I think not!
The Verdict:
Kick A** Machine! Expensive? Yes. But it's cheaper than the top of the line powerbook and it's just as stylish. Heavy? You betcha. You won't be bringing this one on the plane to watch movies with unless you buy Qosmio his own seat! And even then he'll suck up all the batteries long before you are done watching your DVD.
The Qosmio is a semi-portable, high end desktop replacement with lots and lots off bells and whistles, power and style galore. It has a few quirks but all in all it rocks!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 2149.00
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: Greater than 15 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: SuperDisk
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50
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Epinions.com ID:
castrostreet
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Member: Jason Davison
Reviews written: 55
Trusted by: 3 members
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