Customer Reviews

Toshiba Satellite T215D-S1150 TruBrite 11.6-Inch Laptop (Chrome)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've enjoyed my netbooks, most recently my ASUS Eee PC 1000HE 10.1-Inch Blue Netbook - 9.5 Hour Battery Life. But they have their limits of peformance, screen resolution, and small keyboards. I couldn't use my netbook for some work-related projects for which I use my 3 year old Toshiba laptop. As much as I like my netbook, it's always been more of an 'accessory' computer. I'd have preferred to put it in my tote bag when heading out to work, but usually toted the older laptop instead.

Then I saw this new Satellite. Small and almost exactly as light as my netbook. But this notebook has a full sized keyboard, widescreen display capable of higher resolution than my netbook, a dual-core processor, Windows 7 Home Premium, and a RAM capacity of 8 GB. At a decent price. The tradeoff: just average battery life.

Maybe if it wasn't so pretty, and at a good price point, I wouldn't have been so quick to buy it. But it's an elegant package. Sleek silver keyboard, lid in a subtle gray on black pattern that resists fingerprints and smudges, and a thin profile. So I took the plunge and brought it home.

I haven't been sorry yet after a week or so. I'm writing this review on it. My fingers like the full-sized keyboard with no funny shift key locations. This notebook - as of now amazon's product title calls it a "laptop" but it's surely a small one - has immediately replaced my netbook. The 4 hour battery life of the T215D isn't spectacular but it's going to be sufficient 99% of the time for my use. I'll just have to remember to keep it charged.

I'm new to Windows 7 but finding it a quick adjustment. My favorite office and graphics programs have loaded easily, and although I haven't yet supplemented the OEM 2 GB of RAM, operations are nimble and quick. This small notebook has the capacity to handle my work-related projects and I expect that in due course I will retire the old notebook too. For my needs, the T215D is where the netbook meets the notebook.

EDITED to add: I've just seen a later review of this product here, which claims that it feels "flimsy" - and that the DVD drive pops open when the computer is picked up. That review is completely wrong - because this notebook of course has no DVD drive. I've been using the notebook at home and on the go and it certainly has not seemed "flimsy" to me.

EDITED again on July 30, 2010 to add: I opened the machine and confirmed that it came with one 2GB RAM stick - meaning the second RAM slot was empty. After consultation with my cousin the IT pro, I purchased and installed a compatible 2GB RAM chip = Crucial CT25664BC1067 2GB 204-PIN PC3-8500 SODIMM DDR3 Memory Module. The result with a total of 4 GB of RAM, is even better performance than before.

I upgraded the ram to 4GB on the first day, it has two slots, one open. This thing is fast for an 11.6 netbook+ and the screen is fantastic. Sharp, bright and great for movies with 16 x 9 format. The keyboard is easy to use for touch typing, has a good size right shift key, dedicated home/end and pgup/pgdn keys. The small green led on the caps lock key is great, but there are no on screen graphics for volume levels. Touch pad is slick and it is easy to feel the textured palm rest if your fingers go outside the nice sized pad. The seperate left and right buttons are easy to press and make a soft click sound. The fan is usually on but is not too loud and the bottom gets warm but not hot. Toshiba bloatware can be easily removed, and the amount is on par with some other manufacturers. One trade off vs intel chips with ion is shorter battery life, I get between 3 to 4 hours, but the speed crushes even a dual core atom. Great build quality, it feels really solid and has no keyboard flex. Even without Bluetooth, this is a five star winner and well worth the premium price.

I received this on Monday. It's been a very enjoyable experience so far. The screen looks very vivid and very satisifed with the 11.6" size. The cpu is very capable (873 [...] rating). Video files from my hd camcorder play with no problems (mts format/avchd). The keyboard is very nice and I have long fingers. When I ran a memory upgrade check, it shows that the 2gb ram is in one slot and I have another 2gb on order. Another + is that there is very little heat coming from the bottom of the case...very nice. This is probably due to both AMD selecting 12w power and the fan flow coming out of the left side.

The overall build quality is solid and the look of the computer in general looks very nice. The chrome is a nice touch. All I can say is both Toshiba and AMD have done a very nice job with their products. Highly recommend this so far.

I have had this laptop for about 3 months now and cannot say enough great things about it. Let me preface this by saying that I am, and have been for a long time, a computer geek that has a really hard time tolerating crappy computer equipment. That said, I am a huge fan of my little Toshiba T215. It was one of the best computer purchases I have ever made... perfectly priced for what it offers.

Pros:
- Light. I havent put it on a scale, but I would easily trust the 3.3 LBS that Toshiba quotes. Oh, and that DOES include battery. I easily had heavier text books in college than this laptop.
- Screen is beautiful and bright! Compared to my other laptop, a year and a half old ASUS F8Va with a great screen, this LED backlit screen is twice as bright. It doesn't bother me in the least when I lower the brightness on battery, because even half or 2/3 of the way down, it's still pretty much as bright as I'm used to with other laptops! Oh, and it's also a 16:9 screen, meaning that HDTV fits natively without any letterboxing above or beside the video.
-Size. It's very small, but not painfully small like the typical netbook. I wish more netbooks were this size, because there are lots of people like myself who have somewhat clunky fingers and don't have the best luck fitting onto the incredibly small keyboards that the 10 inch netbooks usually have. Admittedly, this keyboard is still quite small, but it's big enough to be usable for extended periods of time.
-Look. It's a great looking and well designed laptop from the outside.
-Overall usability. It's not the fastest laptop I've used, but it's not supposed to be. It is a bit slow at times, but has never been a problem for me. Remember, I HATE slow/crappy computers.
-Battery life - I have never timed it from 100%-0%, but my guess is that I get about 4-4.5 hours of batter life with WIFI on. I'm sure Amazon's 5.15 rating is without WIFI. For such a small battery and such a great laptop, that is a great amount of ontime.
-It's quiet. The fan virtually never runs on battery and only occasionally runs on plug. When it does, it's nice and quiet.
-Finally, it's cool. Because it's not a super hot processor, it does a good job of staying cool.

Cons:
-Wish it had Bluetooth.
-The Atheros wifi card is a popular one these days but it can be finicky sometimes...
-It definitely has moments where you wish it was faster. But these are few and far between when you remember how great it is overall.

I can't think of a better mobility-focused laptop you can buy today for $450-500. This Toshiba is definitely a champ.

While higher priced than other netbooks, worth the extra cost. The AMD dual processor is considerably faster than the Intel Atom, so fast I'm rarely noticing any speed degradation from a typical dual or quad core intel or Mac desktop in every day use. Was also pleasantly surprised by the video abilities... 720P streams over the internet without a hitch, and World of Warcraft plays full screen with moderate video settings at 20-30 FPS, which is more than adequate.

The keyboard area is a bit garish... an unfortunate look, but I got used to it. The design is very good.. one of the best trackpads and button placements and feel I've noticed on a netbook. The weight (barely over 3lbs) is great, the red cover kind of cool. Battery life is where you really take a hit, compared to most netbooks.. 3.5-4.5 hours, so you don't want to use this off a charger all day.

The screen is very clear and bright.. you definitely need young eyes to read some web pages on this, but that's a function of the screen size in general and could be fixed by zooming in and changing resolutions.

Definitely a good netbook.. for $100 more than a typical netbook you get WAYYY more processing and video power, a bigger screen, and a better designed keyboard/mouse. I recommend for others.

I had been looking for a portable laptop for a while now and eventually settled on this based on the price and size of the unit. If you're looking for something with enough power to do almost any standard tasks on it bar messing around with massive spread sheets, CAD work or intense gaming (though I have had no troubles playing Starcraft 2) then I thoroughly recommend this laptop.

Again the only gripe that could be found would be the battery life (but for the power and size of the unit it's to be expected. Also it comes with quite a bit of bloatware but that's nothing that wasn't easily fixed by a fun deletion run.

The omission of an optical drive really hasn't been an issue so far as most software is downloadable nowadays anyway.

The keyboard doesn't feel cramped at all and the multi touch capabilities of the touchpad are a very nice addition which just adds to the overall crisp feeling of the laptop.

The display is much better than I expected with a fairly high resolution it gives very good movie watching options, and the on board speakers though quite don't give terrible sound quality and are sufficient for most viewing.

Overall if you're looking for an inexpensive laptop that can be walked around without it feeling like a brick (I often run 10km in and out of work with it in my backpack) then I would say this is the laptop for you.

I had my eye on this one for some time because I currently have a 4 year old Toshiba Satellite 13.3" and love it. I travel constantly and I wanted something thin and light - but the 10" Netbooks seemed almost TOO small with browsing and e-mail capability but that's all. As Goldilocks would say....That 15" laptop is too big. That 10" netbook is too small...but the Satellite T215 11.6" screen is JUST RIGHT. High Definition sharp and bright picture with very good resolution.
I've only owned it for 5 hours - but so far am loving it. Setup was super easy right out of the box. It self-identified available Wi-Fi networks immediately and I was online in about 3 minutes. I'm adjusting to Windows 7 however, because I'm SO used to using Outlook Express as my primary e-mail app for years. But getting back to this notebook - it is just barely bigger than a netbook - but with the speed and responsiveness of a more conventional laptop.
If you don't set the screen on the brightest setting - the charge will last you
around 5 hours - enough for almost any coast-to-coast trip you might be on.
The one weakness is that the built-in speakers are small and weak. Using headphones for sound is practically mandatory.
This isn't a multimedia or gaming machine if that's what you are primarily interested in. But for the traveler on the go who wants to run regular office type applications -I recommend it. I'm a Realtor, and I'm sure it will be able to handle all of my applications just fine. Oh and the best part is that I bought mine today at Fry's Electronics who had it marked down to $399 !!! I'm very happy with my purchase.

If Quality, Speed and Memory is what you want you will love this Toshiba with its 11.5 screen. I looked at them all and compared what was being offered with price being second or third on the list. This is no cheap machine, but Quality it is. I up-graded ram to 4 gigs as past reviewers had sugested. Its a slick looking LED monitor, great picture.

Whatever good you've read about this computer is true. It's VERY portable and light (even fits in a small portfolio case as it's about the size of a standard sheet of paper but thicker.) I swapped a MacBook out to get this one. It's smaller, lighter, faster, works better with Windows and a great value. It has full Win 7 64 bit support and is very fast for what I do. It connects well with both public and private networks. Don't be fooled by the small screen; it's very readable. Further, the "Magic Touch" touch pad lets you zoom effortlessly. I tried a number of different laptops in stores (I was unhappy with the MacBook keyboard) and found that the Toshiba keyboard was the most natural feeling and enabled me to type the fastest. The touch pad and left and right click buttons seem to be in just the right places compared to other laptops. To effectively try typing in a store (and I would have bought this computer in a store if it was available) find a 13" Toshiba laptop as its keyboard is similar. Actually, even the Toshiba netbook has a similar keyboard. If the store's computer doesn't have a word processor activated, you will find Microsoft Works in the full list of programs and can use it to test the typing. I use this computer to access data stored on my desktop (I do a thumb-drive swap of data before travelling) and also use it to access the Internet. I'm using Microsoft Works and the free OpenOffice.org software which enables me to open documents saved in Office 2010 formats. Others have suggested more memory but for my use I've found I have plenty of memory and processor power when looking at the Task Manager performance charts. That said, the extra memory is inexpensive if you do find that you need it. Did I say it's VERY portable and light?

I bought this netbook for the college. I wanted to have an AMD based netbook because Intel Atom has great battery, but the performance is unbearable even with XP and upgraded to 2GB.
After doing some research, I have been wondering why AMD K325 is higher than K125 even it's clocked at 1.3GHz, but soon I realized it's dual-core and don't be fooled by the clock speed. It outperformed most of netbooks I used even with some laptops, so I bought it for premium price (most of netbooks have 7 Starter installed which is unacceptable).
I did some upgrade on this unit including upgrade from 7 HP to 7 Pro (I have upgrade bought with student price) and increase RAM to 4GB. After these upgrade, the performance is just better and the Win 7 experience index increased from 2.9 to 3.2 (don't be fooled by the number, the average number is >4 in every aspect and the memory is 5.6 thanks to DDR3.
Playing slingplayer can be pretty tricky with netbook because the reduced CPU and GPU performance. It can play up to 4000kbps (1440x540) without any single hiccup and I am able to run other applications (this is impossible with Atom-based netbooks even down to 1500kbps).
The battery is a bit on the weak side because it's merely 48Wh, which is less than 61Wh from NB305. However, NB305 is slower even in Always On mode than running Power Saver on this unit, so the trade-off is still reasonable. If you feel one battery is not enough (it can run up to 4 hours in Power Saver mode), you can buy 61Wh and get another 1.5 hours.
Sound is pretty tiny as other netbooks, but you do some trick (go to sound setting, and choose loudness effect which raise lower part of the sound to make it louder). A USB speakers is recommended if you want more louder listening.
There are 2+1 USB connectors plus one shared external SATA connector on the left. On the real world test, the speed is exceptionally fast. It's about 8-10x faster than USB connection, but this can also take up to 40% of CPU usage.
I have not tested HDMI jack yet, so no comment is given this time.
The keyboard is OK, but I'd prefer the old school style because I miss some characters sometimes. The touchpad works fine and it doesn't have any wacky behavior or any sudden move of cursor which can interfere your typing, but the buttons are kinda hard to press and much harder for fatter thumbs.
The screen looks pretty good at 3-4 brightness and the value more than that is not necessary, but the viewing angle is narrow (up and down). I think screen on Toshiba laptops has similar problem (I have 2 other laptop and netbook).
The left side of palm rest is a bit warm when you typing (or if you're left-handed), but it's not getting too hot like NB305.
Conclusion: This premium netbook has exceptional performance and I see it's sold out very fast, so if you can spend $100-120 more, go for it and you will not regret.