Customer Reviews

Toshiba Satellite M55-S331 14" Laptop (Intel Pentium M Processor 740 (Centrino), 512 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, DVD SuperMulti Drive)

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

 

 

I recently handed down my clunky 4 year old Dell Dimension desktop and heeded the advice of a computer geek I knew back in college, "If you're going to buy a PC laptop, get a Toshiba." So I did. And I'm very happy with the decision.

First off, the cons.

The touchpad is a little close to my thumbs, so I'm constantly jumping the cursor around as I'm typing. Easily fixed with a Microsoft wireless mouse and the touchpad turned off.

The ability to scale up is pretty limited to the hard drive, and at 8O GB and a high spin rate, I don't think I'll be needing much more.

The DVD-WR drive is a little noisy, but there is a system utilty that dampens the spin rate/noise when it cranks up. So it's not a big deal.

I'm not a gamer, but my guess is, if you want a portable computer for gaming and video, you might want something a little more geared for that.

The speakers are adequate, again, this isn't meant as an extensive multimedia machine.

Now, the positives. The TruBrite screen is excellent, better than some flat panel monitors.

I have had no system crashes since purchasing two weeks ago. I run Firefox for web browsing, Office XP, and Windows XP home. I am also a compulsively clutter free user, so everything is lean and mean on my machine, baby. Excellent in Excel (I'm in finance)and other big resource hogs.

Nice, simple streamline design, looks very elegant next to some of those monstrosities you see people lugging around town. Relatively light, slim, and easily portable.

Battery life is about three and a half to four hours if you really conserve, about 1.5 to 2 otherwise.

The keyboard has excellent spring and feel, mulitiple options for keypad, media, etc.

I'm no tech guru, but this is a great machine, zero complaints so far, and I'm hoping that the reliability factor for Toshiba holds up to the reputation. Very pleased, and for the price, should get 2-4 years of use before upgrading again. An excellent investment for an MBA student or entry to mid-level managers. Highly recommended.

Thin, light, high performance, reliable (up to now), good configuration, very good connectivity, great screen.

I have this notebook, and people often comment about how big it is, but it doesn't bother me because I use it on my desk instead of a desktop, also it's portable so no big deal. I think it works pretty well, and the keyboard is big enough to let me type properly, unlike the tiny notebooks.
Overall it's good, I've had it since the begining of the year and I'm quite attached to it.

I've had this laptop for 1 month short of three years, and I'm typing this review on it. I installed Ubuntu Linux on it August of last year, and it's really given it a new lease on life. Right now I'm running a custom install with Ubuntu 8.04 and OpenBox as the window manager (with lightweight alternatives for basic software compared to even the default Ubuntu install, and no GNOME).

I've never had any problems with it, except when it started overheating due to dust in the heatsink. This I solved by dismantling it per a detailed guide I found on the Web and taking the motherboard out to clean it (it doesn't have a nifty access panel for this like some other Toshiba laptops).

I've installed another 1 GB of RAM in the expansion slot, and this helped a lot when I used to run Google Earth and Firefox with about 50 tabs open at the same time (it used to swap pretty heavily with the default 512 MB), and now with 1.5 GB and lightweight software, I'm usually using less than a few hundred megs for program files, and the rest fills up with the hard drive cache, resulting in lightning fast speed on a rather old and outdated machine (even with a stripped down XP install compared to a default Ubuntu install, Ubuntu is faster).

A big complaint I have when I bought it was the massive amount of bloatware which was installed from the factory. I quickly installed XP without the bloatware, which helped immensely with performance.

Also, the BIOS in this machine is horrible (I upgraded to v2.00 at some point). I recently created a LiveUSB install on a USB flash drive, and wanted to run it without a hard drive. Well, there's no way to disable the hard drive in the BIOS, and it won't boot without one..it just freezes at the BIOS screen, before it even tries to boot any other devices. That, and the worthless boot menu puts USB drive under a sub category of "hard drives" (and puts it under the internal hard drive by default), and there's no way to actually access this from the boot menu when pressing F12. The only way to boot from a USB device is to plug the device in, go into the Setup menu, and change the boot order so that the USB device is above the internal hard drive.

Other than that, though, the DVD multi-drive is awesome, cpu frequency scaling works great for reducing power consumption and heat dissipation, and like I said, it's still going strong after 3 years of heavy use (I ran mprime (aka Prime95 in Windows) on it 24/7 for nearly a year with nary a problem).

Oh, and the touchpad is very sensitive, but in Linux, one can configure the touchpad click to be disabled for any period of time after typing (I set it for one second). That way, when you're typing and you bump it, it won't steal your focus away. Not sure if you can do that in XP or not, but it's pretty simple in Linux.

I received this laptop as a graduation gift. I would have never chosen it on my own. First of all, it it too heavy and awkward to carry around. Secondly, even at its highest the volume is not very loud. The quality of the speakers leaves a lot to be desired - They have a very "tinney" sound - Definately not for multimedia use. Worst of all is the jumping cursor. It is impossible to type without the cursor jumping randomly around the page and inserting words within words. Disabling the touchpad helps - but then what is the sense of having a touchpad? About all this piece of junk is good for is playing solitaire.

sorry, I dont write good inglish and i dont kwon other way to contac you, so i will write here. I pay for the laptop and when the company tray to give me the pack I never be at home. Can you please make the travel again. Thank and sorry

I purchased the Toshiba M55-s331 and loved it for it's true bright screen which is awesome! Within one day it was freezing up every 2 hours. I've only had it for three days and will be returning it to BestBuy tomorrow! Don't waste your money! I've had a Sony Vaio VGN-S150 for almost 2 years and have never had one problem with it and their customer service is awesome!

Also, Internet Explorer keeps crashing, software doesn't load completely....it's a mess! I wish I would've read the reviews about Toshiba Satelite's before going and purchasing one! Sony's may cost more, but they're worth every penny.
I'll never buy a Toshiba again!