Customer Reviews

Toshiba Satellite 3005-S307 Laptop (1.13-GHz Pentium III, 256 MB RAM, 30 GB hard drive)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This laptop is great, I choose to buy it instead of the 5005 model, because it has a better and newer PIII-M chip with 512K cache instead of 256, and 133 system bus speed!

Toshiba says that the combo drive is a 4X4X6xDVD but I find that to be not true, I have installed Nero and CDRWIN and both are burning Cds at 8X!

30 gigs hard drive and it seems that Toshiba fixed the speekers so now the do sound better than the 3000-S304 model!

I think this is a great buy for the buck and I got linux installed into it with no problems!

I've been a Toshiba and Dell laptop user for about a decade. I particularly enjoy my new Toshiba S307 for speed, capacity and the CD burner. A good buy for the money. Good speed, XP is good, I hook straight into the DSL at home or the network at work with no problems.

Only drawback: lithium ion batteries could be bigger (longer lasting). My Dell laptops give me 4 hours per battery. Not so long with the S307.

Don't think twice about buying a S307. A good machine.

Okay, well all the positive parts of this laptop have been told so i'll be negative and concentrate on the cons. (keep in mind im comparing it to the compaq 1720us i returned and my old gateway 3150XL)

Con:
-Heat. This gets a bit warm. Especially compared to the compaq with the same processor

-Hard Drive. I read the complaints and they are right. Click click click. Its really annoying and is a major part of why i got rid of it. The compaq is so super quiet its amazing. Like when you hear a new car and cant tell if the engine is on or not

-Video Out. I dont know if this is standard but you have to reduce your laptop screen to 800x600 to do video out to a TV. The compaq didnt require any resizing so i played counterstrike on TV. Cool!

Pro:
-GeForce2Go in this thing is great but that 800x600 out is the other reason why i am getting rid of this.

-Great trackpad. much better than the compaqs

-8X DVD is very cool

A excellent machine all round, has excellent specifications, good battery life, good screen, Lightwieght!, looks good, 3 USB ports and IR port (unlike the Sony Vaio GR series!) , CDRW/DVD combined, 256 RAM, 1.13 Ghz, Good speakers, excellent support and support tools, The 1 year warrenty is abit short, the Keyboard is a great IBM keyboard, Having looked around alot i belive it to be from the best in its class!, Deffinatley a great buy!!!

I own a Toshiba Satellite laptop and it has been a nightmare.
Lies and lack of the most basic warranty.
Too late did I find out that the only people happy with Toshiba are the ones that did not need service yet.I would strongly recommend that potential consumers check things out on Complaints.com,consumeraffairs.com,thesqueakywheel.com and also search Google using the company name and "complaints" in their search(i.e. "Toshiba laptop complaints"). CNET is also definitely worth a search...a lot of the lack of reliability and total lack of service issues have already been discussed there with detailed references as to models, etc.

As for this being old news...well, I expected Toshiba to have learned something from being successfully sued. That particular lawsuit was not frivolous...and my friends who've worked for Toshiba confirm that the company has a "bad attitude" when it comes to "known defects". (It's one thing to have hardware issues; it's another to sell stuff with known issues.)

"Caveat Emptor!"

I spent a ton of time doing research for laptops, and this model (3005-S307) won for having the best features and at the lowest price. I looked at all the other brands, dell, hp, sony, compaq, but feature for feature, they were not matched by this machine in a similar price range. All the glowing reviews this machine received are accurate. I was a little worried because there were complaints also about the machine, but fortunately, the issues they talked about are so minor, that it's not really a problem at all.

I've been using this laptop as my main work computer now for almost 3 months. That means it's on 12 hours every single day, and is being pushed hard. So far it has been awesome, and has performed well beyond my expectations. I'm totally thrilled with my purchase, and I don't remember the last time I felt that way about any computer purchase.

As to answering the complaints: Yes, the hard drive does occasionally click but it really doesn't bother me at all, and most of the time I don't even notice it. The machine does get fairly warm, but I've yet to own a laptopt that did not.

My biggest complaint is there's no ps/2 port, so you need a usb mouse and keyboard if you use it on your desktop like I do. Hardly a big deal these days as both are very cheap to come by.

So if you want a terrific machine at a terrific price this is the machine to get.

The Toshiba Satellite 3005-S307 is a solid all around notebook. I did a lot of research before buying a replacement for a very old Toshiba Tecra laptop. The specs really can not be beat for the price by any other manufacturer. ... I have had the computer for a roughly a week now, so I am a little more familiar with its workings. The computer has performed flawlessly with excellent DVD playback and long battery life. In addition the computer has a well put together feel to it. My only concern has been a faint ticking noise from the hard drive that persists after the drive accesses especially while surfing the internet. ... Other than this small concern the computer has been wonderful. Highly recommended and an unsurpassed value in notebook computers.

I've had this laptop for 10 days. I did quite a bit of research before getting it and am very happy with my decision. The combination processor/video card is very good. I benchmarked it with some intensive numerical calculations/graphics in MATLAB and it gave very impressive results (compared to much more powerful workstations).

For the more casual user it has all the features you need: 30G disk, fast processor, excellent graphics, many ports (including firewire and smartmedia) and good screen.

The disk drive does click a bit, and you have to uncheck the "cleartext" option in XP to make the text sharper! However these are minor issues.

The Toshiba 3005 is a full-featured, powerful notebook computer that is relatively lightweight, has a compact easily portable size, and a reasonable cost. This is my fourth laptop, and is by far my most satisfying choice to date. A notebook computer should be truly portable, which means that it must have decent battery life, be light and easy to lug around, and be truly self-contained and full-featured. The Toshiba 3000/3005 series notebook computer perfectly fills all of these requirements.

The smart media card reader is incredibly useful if you happen to have other digital hardware that shares these media cards. I can just pop the card out of my Olympus digital camera, slide it into my Toshiba notebook, where it immediately appears as a disk drive, and then just quickly drag files over for viewing. The smart media card is fully accessible as a standard disk drive. The built-in fax/modem, 10/100 Ethernet, IR port, two PCMCIA card slots, three powered USB ports, and one unpowered firewire port, give me nearly all of the connectivity that I need. I do wish that Toshiba had chosen to include a legacy serial port, since my Earthmate GPS receiver and mapping software requires an RS232c port, and I would have preferred not to have to lug around a USB converter. I also wish that my Toshiba had an optionally available internal WiFi wireless network card and built-in antenna. I use a PCMCIA card for that purpose, but would have appreciated being able to eliminate the protruding antenna.

The keyboard and touchpad work fine. The speakers are adequate for personal listening and are positioned for surprisingly good stereo separation. The CD/DVD/Media player controls work well and are perfectly positioned to be accessible with the notebook lid open or closed. It makes for a rather expensive CD player, but it is nice to be able to listen to music even without powering up the CPU and hard drive. The large hard disk drive has been great for handling digital video transferred from my camcorder via the firewire port, and has also allowed me the luxury of storing a library of many hundreds of MP3s for musical enjoyment without having to carry any CDs when I travel. The DVD player and CD writing capabilities work as advertised, and this is my first notebook that can easily play a feature length movie and still give me an hour or so of work time on a single battery. Also notable was the excellent glitch-free quality of DVD playback even while on battery power. And for you game players, I am truly impressed with the performance of the NVIDIA GeForce2 graphics subsystem of this machine. I have Half-Life loaded on the hard disk, and have been provided with many hours of very enjoyable game play. There are very few notebook computers that offer this excellent graphic chip, and even fewer in this price range, and compact lightweight size.

All-in-all, a great machine... feature packed, lightweight and compact, reasonably priced, solidly built, and incredibly powerful.

I bought a Satellite in Sept. 2005 and two months later, returned it to Best Buy because it wouldn't connect to the Internet for no apparent reason. They immediately took it away and gave me a new model because of a "manufacturing defect that had been "fixed" with the new model ... then CANCELLED the $150 rebate that was adsvertised with the first defective model! I protested vigorously, but was rudely informed that since I was getting a "new laptop," I was no longer entitled to the rebate! Go figure that one!! I'll never buy another Toshiba.