Customer Reviews

Toshiba Portege A605-P201 12.1-Inch Laptop (1.40 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400 Processor, 3 GB RAM, 250 GB Hard Drive, DVD Drive, Vista Ultimate)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I always had TOSHIBA as one of my favorite brands for laptops. Unfortunatelly, that's no longer true.

This laptop deserves 2 stars because it's fast and light and that's it.

It was wrapped on a thin and weak plastic material. If you decide for some reason to hold the laptop with a single hand on the corner, you will hear the HD touching something.

The speaker (ONLY ONE) is terrible... I'd say there is no speaker... you cannot hear a thing out of this thing.

The keyboard is notably weak... and I am positive it will need to be replaced soon... I am already feeling something wrong on the letter T.

Today, I noticed that the frame around the screen (another weak plastic) is cracked... I have no idea how this happened... I handle my laptop with care, it didn't fall... I really cannot tell how it happened.

Toshiba just lost a customer. I won't return it because I don't want to backup and reinstall all my stuff again (which takes me 30 hours to do) but I won't consider TOSHIBA anymore for my next latpop.

I wanted to like this laptop, small, lightweight, pretty fast for the specs, amazing battery life, but unfortunately Toshiba doesn't know anything about their own products and Amazon just copies that information blindly. Both on Toshiba's website and amazon.com it says: "This notebook also features an integrated audio card and two stereo speakers."

This is false, this laptop has 1 mono speaker in the upper left corner and at max volume you could barely hear it. When I contacted Amazon.com all they could say was return it, well that's what I did.

Either way if your looking for a small, ultra portable laptop with a great battery life, get this (as long as you plan on using headphones and don't care about the speakers).

Oh, and 1 more thing, the amount of pre-loaded bloatware is insane, 76 process running on first start up.

First, before buying any laptop you should know what features you are looking for and what features the laptop posses. This laptop is not for gaming or heavy duty multi media. The Toshiba Protégé A605-P200 is designed to be portable and that is exactly what it does well.

For being a 12.1 it still has many great features. I would go through them, but if you actually read about this laptop then you already know. I would like to point out that it does have one speaker, but I already knew this before I purchased the laptop. This information can be found simply by researching the laptop. I use headphones if I listen to music, so, again, this laptop works out great. If you need great laptop sound (speakers) you shouldn't be looking at 12.1's anyways. The laptop is also very light and durable. I am not sure what other people do to their laptops, but the design of this laptop is structurally sound for only being a few pounds. Is the laptop indestructible? No. You should still treat it with care since it does cost a tad more then entry level laptops. I do not understand why you wouldn't.

So, the Toshiba Protégé A605-P200 is a great portable laptop with decent power (cpu, ram, hard drive), and is packed with several external connectors and features for a 12.1.

I was excited to receive my Portege, and to play around with it. The fingerprint reader is fun, the laptop is very lightweight, the battery life is good.... but then a couple of problems hit in quick succession. After the second problem, I gave up on the laptop and sent it back to Amazon (it's traveling there right now). I'm writing this review from my new MacBook - yes, the combination of the Portege and Vista were the final push for me to go Mac.

The specific problems that got to me were:

(1) Despite being fast overall, the laptop would do some things *very* slowly. The two examples I remember happened in Microsoft Word. When I would call the Search box (Ctrl+F), it would take a long time to drag itself across the screen and become operational (about 4 seconds). During this time I was unable to do anything else - an annoying mid-work freeze. The same thing happened whenever I saved the document after a long time of not saving it. The graphic that folds the document into the little diskette icon at the bottom of the screen would be very slow (again, about 4 seconds), during which I'd be frozen.

(2) The ethernet port didn't work. Honestly, that's what doomed the laptop for me. I plugged the cable in, and the laptop just went "huh?" I then plugged the same cable into a MacBook that happened to be nearby (my girlfriend's), and the Mac went "woohoo, internet!"

That was it. I paid more than $1,000 in order to do problem-solving right out of the box? Umm, no. I called Amazon, printed out the return label, and shipped it back to Amazon.

Nice computer. A few fatal flaws. Didn't do it for me.