Customer Reviews

Toshiba Satellite M105-S3064 14.1" Widescreen Laptop (Intel Core Duo Processor T2300E, 1024 MB RAM, 120 GB Hard Drive, DVD SuperMulti Drive)

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

 

 

Before settling on this laptop, I considered similar units by Dell and HP. Dell couldn't compete in terms of price/components, and HP is a disaster when it comes to customer service. I called Toshiba twice before my purchase (spending considerable time discussing three options with one rep) and twice since I bought the computer. It never took more than a minute to talk to someone, and today it was like 10 seconds. That put Toshiba right on the top of my list. So far, I am very pleased with this computer. Its two major drawbacks are battery life (I will be buying a 12 cell backup) and a cd tray which appears to be rather delicate. Boot time is not stellar, but it never is. With the 1024 MB of Ram, it is a fast computer, and the 120 GB hard drive should be more than enough for most people. The computer loads many unneeded programs (the Toshiba tech went through the entire list with me and we eliminated 18 of them), and you may want to remove a program or two from the hard drive. I have yet to try Wi-Fi, so I can't speak to that. Buy a wireless mouse that plugs into one of the USB ports on the side of the computer, and you will be happy (Microsoft has a nifty one that runs on a single AA battery).

UPDATE: I now have Wi-Fi up and running with a Linksys WRT54GL router, and it works like a charm. There were some issues, however, related to Windows and to the IP address of my laptop. I made a number of additional calls to Toshiba tech support, and I cannot overstate how impressed I was with it, especially because they answer the phone very quickly and call back as promised.

I have to be up-front here - I bought a different model Toshiba - the M105-S3041, from Amazon last month. This laptop, the M105-S3064, uses the same case and display as my laptop. I was initially very happy with it. However, I must caution any potential buyers that the LCD on this system has a lot of light leakage. Otherwise a great little system for the money, though.

I'm not sure what caused the previous reviewer to experience problems out of the box, but I'd recommend returning it for a different machine.

Mine was a breeze setting up out of the box once I realized there's an On|Off switch for wireless access. And, while it does come with a good bit of bloatware, it was all easily removable. There are a few other pre-installed programs (like Yahoo! Music Engine) I'm going to try out for a few days before deciding whether to ditch them or not, but still far less crud than has been shipped with my previous computers.

The keyboard has a nice feel to it. I've always preferred a laptop's keyboard since I have small hands, so I haven't had any trouble adjusting to this one. The key-click sound is rather nice, too: not as loud as a regular PC keyboard, yet loud enough to let you know your strokes are working. In fact, I spent 3 hours writing yesterday evening and didn't notice any additional errors in my typing.

I'm not a fan of touchpads, though, so I added a USB Wireless mouse. This machine ships with updated drivers, so it instantly recognized the mouse which meant I was off and clicking in no time.

Unlike my old Dell laptop, this one allows me to turn off the touchpad when using a mouse, and that makes me very happy. (I hate it when my thumb accidentally launches a program while I'm in the middle of something.) Another neat feature about the touchpad: you can set certain corners of it to launch various programs. Not a feature I'll use, I think, but still pretty cool.

The fingerprint reader is sweet since it's the one thing that ensures I finally (FINALLY!)have a computer that neither my husband nor kids can tinker with. There's even a quick switch if I need to step away that will blank the screen and require a fingerprint swipe to resume. I love that! I can't tell you how many times in the past I've sat down to start writing or blogging only to find that someone either screwed with my desktop (a minor peeve), read my email and forgot to mark it as "unread" so I knew to answer it (a rather large annoyance) or, worse yet, downloaded something thats screwed up my entire PC (a major peeve). Not anymore. This laptop is mine, mine, all mine! Bwahahahahahaha!

Great little laptop.

I do have a bias towards Toshiba since my first laptop was also a Toshiba, but a bias not without reason I guess. I bought the first one in 2000 and its still rock solid, even able to run Windows XP satisfactorily with 192mb of ram (max). I gave that to my Dad and after a laptop-less gap of several months picked this one up from Amazon.

There is a lot packed inside this laptop for the money you pay. Seriously.

The display is beautiful (no dead pixels, had 3 dead ones in my first Toshiba) crisp and bright, applications zip with amazing speed thanks to the dual core processor and a nice 1GB of ram. You can instantly feel the speed when you open up bulky applications like the Yahoo Music Engine (that comes bundled and which then upgrades itself to the the latest Yahoo Musicmatch Jukebox) and the new Internet Explorer 7 (does not come bundled, but a fast install from Microsoft's website).

The 120gb HDD is sweet - although there's about 8.5 gb of stuff already on there when you get the laptop. But with that much space it should hardly matter. Microsoft-works, OneNote and a variety of trial/non-trial software take up that space.

I also tested the Intel Pro Wireless 3945ABG built into the wireless and after a few trial and error sessions was able to set it up with my D-link DI614+. Mostly, the issue seemed to be at my router's end - the laptop was unable to obtain an IP through DHCP, while my two other PCs (XP and MEPIS linux) worked just fine. I discovered that upgrading the firmware on the router took care of this problem. The firmware is available on the D-link website. One side effect of this upgrade was that the router would lock up after a few hours - this was (I think) due to "smurf" attacks from the net that the router suddenly seemed to be vunlnerable to after the firmware upgrade (why?). I found that disabling the "Respond to pings on the WAN" setting on the router made this problem go away. I do not know if this problem is only specific to the 614+ or even to its cousin the 614 - either way if you have one of these routers you wanna try the fix that I tried.

Once the router firmware was upgraded the wireless worked like a charm and as expected. The 614+ is an old product - it uses 802.11b so its kinda slow - max speed that the laptop was connecting to it was 11mbps - but it hardly "seemed" slow. All websites I visited were screaming fast on the laptop, downloads were steady the connection has never once broken in the last week that I've been playing with it even with the laptop at one corner of the house downstairs and the router at the extreme opposite end upstairs.

For some reason, playing a DVD through the Windows Media Center software produced jerky video - not pleasant on the eye. However, playing it using the bundled InterVideo DVD was smooth and pleasant.

Harman/Kardon speakers are great - though if you want any noticeable bass you have to hook it up to your stereo.

I'm a Linux fan so I also tried running the Ubuntu (Dapper) Live CD on the laptop - great first impression. Wireless worked right out of the box (wow, for linux!) once I associated the wireless interface with my router's SSID (which Ubuntu readily detected along with a dozen others SSIDs and listed for selection). Mandriva 2007 failed only in that area. I've yet to try Mepis on it just for fun.

Battery life is moderate - I get about 2.5 hours with wifi on and Yahoo music belting out songs non-stop from the local harddrive. Without wifi, I guess you could extend it a little. Longer life would be a nice-to-have for me at this point but not a must-have. I guess upgrading the battery would also help.

There's more to discover on this little machine (not yet tried the DVD multi drive burner for eg) but all I can say at this point is: Wow!

I purchased this notebook from BestBuy on a spur of the moment because I had been looking for a replacement for my HP which was old and I was afraid of HP since they merged with Compaq (junk). I had it for about 2-3 months when I tried to burn a couple of CDs and the DVD super multi drive died. I brought it to the only local service provider for Toshiba and they sat on it for three or four weeks before they anounced: "you have a bad DVD drive" (genius). Then they call back weeks later and say they can't get a new drive from Toshiba for at least another 3 weeks. Now were talking getting my notebook back in about two months total to fix a problem that should not have happened in the first place.

I have looked so many options before I purchase my Toshiba Laptop M105-S3064. I looked for HP, DELL, Fujitsu etc. But finally I decided to go with only this model of Toshiba due to following reasons:
*Processor: Its nothing special but yes its has 1.6Ghz Core Duo from Intel.
*Its very ligth in weight, very thin, wide screen.
*Fast in response as it has 1GB of RAM and 120Gb of HDD
*Secured data and laptop: Its has Finger print scanner which secure your data perfectly, nobody can hack your data until you specify dual mode (with password option), also you can quickly log into your machine by just swiping you configured finger.
*High Spped wireless: it can handle all protocols for wireless till now, 802.11a which can give you upto 108 mpbs of speed. it suports b and g too.
*Screen: Very sharp and good looking screen, becuase its a 14.1 screen, its look really wide and view angle is also enough from diffrent angales.
*It has Card reader for Memory Stick, MMC/SD etc. this is 4-1 reader, I think which is enough.
*Enough ports: Has 4 USB high speed ports, 1 S-Video, 1 Firewire

For the money, this computer has great software and specs. Unfortunately, it was unreliable out of the box. Main problem in the unit I ordered was that it failed to boot up about half the time. Unit "froze" and had to be manually shut down and restarted repeatedly. Also showed several messages re. recovery from "a serious error." Toshiba tech support suggested I use the provided software to reformat and reinstall all the programs - which failed to solve the problem. Using Internet Explorer also was a problem. IE repeatedly stalled and had to be shut down and reopened. In addition, I experienced problems with the installed media center shutting down without warning and keyboard cursor jumping to other parts of the page when typing. I hated to send it back to Amazon (I've had great luck with almost EVERYTHING I've purchased from Amazon over the years) but feared that greater problems lay ahead of the warranty. I suspect that Toshiba cut corners to try to bring the cost down on the M105-3064 - and the result is a product that is unreliable.

A few preliminary notes:

1. The computer I bought was USED
2. I do not know the hardware/software history of the laptop
3. I have no idea how old the computer is, or what modifications were made to the hardware/software before I bought it.

I originally bought this computer because my 10+ year old Dell laptop was finally giving up the ghost. After some brief research, I bought this computer from a pawn shop based on the price and the statistics. So first, an overview of the statistics:

CPU: Intel Centrino Duo, 1.66Ghz
HD: 120GB
Memory: 1GB installed, 4gb capable
Drives:
- DVD/CD combo drive
- multiple USB ports

It's a good little workhorse computer, but there are a few issues that I'm running into.

First: the wireless card refuses to stay connected to my wireless network for any extended period of time (nothing beyond 20 minutes usually), even after updating the driver software for the internal wireless card. It's not an issue related to my wireless network, because the Dell and several other computers have NO problem linking to and working on the wireless network for several hours at a time.

Second: the screen seems to be "dimmer" than a normal screen, and as another user said it "leaks" light around the edges, so that the center of the screen is bright but not as bright as it could or should be.

As a replacement for my ancient Dell computer, it's a nice upgrade, but I will definitely be more cautious about buying a used machine next time. If you're going to buy this model from ANYWHERE, make sure you conduct a thorough examination of the hardware and software capabilities. In particular, make sure that the wireless card will remain connected to a network for longer than 20 minutes...

Well I bought this product, not from amazon, about a year and a half ago. For the first 9 months this computer was wonderful. Unfortunatly about the third week of last June my video card started to fail and I've had half a screen of non comforming pixels. Well a few days ago the video card completly failed and now my computer is unusable until I get a new one. Secondly I wouldn't buy anything Toshiba because when this first happened I was still under warranty and called Toshiba everyday for a month trying to get help and they kept giving me the run around. I'd recommend an HP for anyone looking for a laptop because they're customer service doesn't suck.

For the price paid, this machine really does the job. Fast, good features & productivity, great widescreen display. Outstanding wireless connectivity. Only trouble I had was the fingerprint digital recognition system, since it had an installation problem (laptop doesn't recognize the digital device). Easy burning of cd's and dvd's. I think the cd/dvd feature where you can play music/movies without having to turn on the computer is one of the most enjoyable features of this laptop. Perhaps the only drawback is that it doesn't come with Microsoft's Office. If you invest in this laptop for a 2-3 year productivity period, you're getting your money's worth; for sure the laptop will last longer, assuming you treat it well. Buy it!