My husband purchased a Toshiba Satellite in 2005 for business use. Being a bit of a miser myself (in certain situations), I settled for a Compaq laptop. I was very happy with my laptop, until I worked on his Toshiba for a couple of hours one day. Within 2 weeks, I had sold my laptop and purchased a second Toshiba Satellite.

Using several memory-hogging programs, the computer felt a little slow. I dealt with the issue until my twin toddlers decided to twist the screen on "my" tablet all the way around. For those of you who are wondering, it is not that difficult to force past the allowed 270 degree mark, and it will break all of the circuitry to the tablet screen! My husband (who is well-versed with electrical and electronic equipment) attempted to repair the damage, but the cables were too small and intricate to repair. Luckily, my husband had decided to "upgrade" to a Gateway Tablet PC, so I was able to use my now-broken Toshiba for parts, and upgrade the original Toshiba tablet.

I now have a Toshiba with 100 Gig hard drive, 1 Gig RAM, a portable 60 Gig hard drive, and have upgraded to Windows Vista. I love my system!

Input and output on this computer are way above most of the laptops that I've seen, especially circa 2005. I have three USB ports, 4 size media cards slots (SD, CF, and two others that I can't read the codes for anymore), an S-Video output, built-in mic, good quality sound, and headphones input jack.

The software program, OneNote 2003 (which came with my machine, and I haven't bothered to upgrade), really takes the cake. With the availability to record directly into your notes, clip and paste from the internet, and organize notes just as you would a spiral-bound notebook, I don't even pack a pen and paper anymore...it can all go right here! Want your hand-written notes converted to typing, so you can copy and paste to Word? Not a problem! The handwriting recognition on this machine is amazing!

There are three big drawbacks to this machine, in my opinion. (1) The tablet is heavy, and by the time you pack your power cord and any other gadgets you may have, it can get very heavy for short trips. (2) Within just a couple of months, there were what appeared to be "dots" on the screen, but no amount of cleaning would get rid of them. This is, apparently, problematic with touch-screens. (3) Difficult and expensive to upgrade, as with all laptops and tablets. No DVD-R/W was more of a problem than I realized at first.

Overall, this has been a great machine, and I would heartily recommend to any student or researcher.

Recommended: Yes