Toshiba Satelllite P105-S921 17" Laptop (Intel Core Duo Processor T2400 (Centrino), 1024 MB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, DVD SuperMulti Drive)

by Toshiba

Product Details

• Item Weight: 7 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 11 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000EZIGI4
• Item model number: PSPA6U-01200P
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 12, 2006

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Satisfy your multimedia and gaming needs wherever you roam with the thin, light Toshiba Satellite P105-S921 laptop. You'll enjoy fantastic DVD playback and immersive graphics thanks to the 17-inch TruBrite display and top-of-the-line Nvidia GeForce Go 7900 graphics card with an amazing 256 MB of dedicated video RAM. It comes with a DVi-D video output, enabling you to connect to a high-definition TV, and built-in Harman Kardon speakers that can produce enveloping virtual surround sound.

It's powered by Intel's new, groundbreaking processor--the powerful Core Duo T2400--which provides an optimized, multithreaded architecture for improved gaming and multitasking performance and a more efficient power consumption. The dual execution core T2400 has a 1.83 GHz processor speed and 2 MB L2 cache. This laptop also features a 160 GB hard drive, 1 GB of installed DDR2 RAM, tri-mode 802.11a/b/g wireless connectivity, multi-format/dual-layer DVD burner, and Windows XP Professional.

The Basics

• Hard Drive: Large and in charge, the 160 GB hard drive offers enough to room to hold a digital audio library of over 20,000 songs and still have room left over for movies, games, and a large collection of software. This Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive also quickens the pace with a higher speed transfer of data--akin to FireWire and USB 2.0.
  
• Processor: The intel Core Duo T2400 processor is built with the Mobile Intel 945PM Express chipset, and it has a 1.83 GHz processor speed, super-fast 667 MHz front-side bus (FSB), and large 2 MB L2 cache. (An L2, or secondary, cache temporarily stores data; and a larger L2 cache can help speed up your system's performance. The FSB carries data between the CPU and RAM, and a faster front-side bus will deliver better overall performance.)

  The Intel Core Duo processor has two computational execution cores in a single processor, providing greater system response when running multi-threaded applications simultaneously with no significant increase in power consumption. It's optimized for multitasking and is ready to support the next version of Microsoft Windows, code-named Vista. It can simultaneously run multiple demanding applications--such as graphics-intensive games or serious number-crunching business productivity applications--while downloading music or running virus-scanning security programs in the background. It's more efficient, thanks to Intel's Power Coordination and Deeper Sleep, which help to transfer power only to those areas of the processor that need it. It also features Intel's Digital Media Boost, which delivers enhanced performance on floating point-intensive applications such as CAD tools, 3D and 2D modeling, video editing, digital music, digital photography and gaming.
  

• Memory: The 1 GB of built-in memory (PC5300, DDR2 SDRAM, 2 x 512 MB) is a very good start for power users, and it offers a top-of-class 533 MHz speed. It has two memory slots, enabling you to add a maximum of 4 GB to handle immersive 3D video games, video editing, graphics-intensive presentations, and multiple open business productivity applications.
  
• CD/DVD Drive: The double-layer DVD drive is compatible with a wide range of formats, including both DVD+RW and DVD-RW discs, CD-RW discs, and dual-layer (DL) DVD+/-R discs, which can hold up to 8.5 GB of data--great for backing up your MP3 collection or your most important documents. It features the following speeds: 4x DVD+R DL, 2x DVD-R DL, 4x for both DVD+R/RW, 8x DVD-R, 2x DVD-RW, 5x DVD-RAM, and 24x/10x for CD-R/RW. It reads DVD-ROM discs at 8x and CD-ROMs at 24x.
  
• Keyboard & Mouse: This notebook has a standard 85-key keyboard and electro-static two-button touchpad. It also offers a launch button for the Express CD/DVD media player and control buttons (play, stop, next, previous).

A/V Features
With Toshiba's unique Express Media Player, you can won't have to wait for Windows to boot up before you can start a DVD movie or CD. Just a simple press of the button bypasses the system and starts your media playing.

Screen, Graphics and Sound
The P105-S921 has a 17-inch TFT display with a resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels. It also provides TruBrite technology, which makes images brighter and more vivid thanks to its anti-glare feature. Video is powered by the Nvidia GeForce Go 7900 graphics/video card, which includes 256 MB of dedicated video RAM for uninterrupted, immersive 3D gaming. It features NVidia's PureVideo technology--which provides great picture clarity, smooth video, accurate color, and precise image scaling for video content--and full support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 for stunningly realistic cinematic effects for all DirectX-compatible applications. It also has an integrated audio card that provides 16-bit stereo sound, a built-in microphone, and a volume control dial.

Connectivity and Expansion Slots
The P105-S921 has an integrated tri-mode Intel 802.11a/b/g wireless-LAN that enables you to easily connect at wireless hotspots wherever you roam You get a fairly basic offering of connectivity options:

• 4 USB 2.0 ports for connecting a wide range of peripherals--from digital cameras to MP3 players
• 1 FireWire (also known as IEEE 1394 or i.Link) port for connecting digital video camcorders and other peripherals
• 1 DVI-D video port (for connecting to flat panel, high-definition monitors and televisions)
• 1 VGA monitor port
• 1 S-Video out
• 1 PCMCIA (or PC Card) slot (Type II, PCMCIA R2.01, PC Card16, CardBus)
• 1 headphone jack, 1 microphone jack

It also has an integrated 56K modem (V.90) and an RJ-45 LAN network port (for a 10/100 Gigabit Ethernet connection to networks and DSL/cable modems).

Preloaded System and Software
This system comes with the Windows XP Professional Edition (which adds Microsoft's IIS Web server, back-up and recovery utilities, Remote Desktop, and other enhanced business features) with Service Pack 2 featuring Advanced Security Technologies, which helps to reduce unwanted downloads and pop-ups while surfing the Web. It also comes preloaded with Microsoft Works, Microsoft Office OneNote 2003, McAfee AntiVirus, InterVideo WinDVD and WinDVD Creator, Sonic Solutions RecordNow.

Dimensions and Weight
This notebook measures 15.5 x 10.8 x 1.65 inches and weighs 7.1 pounds.

Power
It's powered by a 9-cell rechargeable lithium-ion battery (4700 mAh), which has a battery life of up to 5.5 hours (depending on usage). It has a recharge time of 3 to 3.5 hours.

What's in the Box
This package contains the P105-S921 notebook PC, rechargeable lithium-ion battery, AC adapter, and operating instructions. It is backed by a one-year limited hardware warranty.

Product Description

The Toshiba Satellite P105-S921 Notebook PC is ultimate gaming by design. This notebook packs an awesome gaming experience into a thinner & lighter notebook, with a stunning 17" diagonal widescreen display. The 1440 x 900 resolution, TruBrite technology and nVIDIA graphics card deliver uninterrupted, unforgettable play time. You can also connect to plasma TV, turn up the sound on the harman/kardon speakers, and shake the foundations with your gaming. If you're ready to get serious about your gamin experience, the Toshiba Satellite P105-S921 is for you. 17.0 TruBrite TFT active display LCD screen Native resolution - 1440 x 900 (WXGA) 1GB DDR2 SDRAM 160GB 4200 rpm Serial-ATA hard drive DVD SuperMulti (+/-R double layer) drive supporting 11 different formats nVIDIA GeForce Go 7900 with 256MB GDDR3 discrete graphics memory Built-in harman/kardon stereo speakers with SRS TruSurround XT virtual surround and SRS WOW stereo enhancement 5-in-1 Bridge Media Adapter -- supports SD and MMC cards, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, xD-Picture Card Connectivity - FireWire, DVI-D, S/P DIF output, RGB out, S-Video, microphone input, headphone out, RJ-11 (modem), RJ-45 (LAN) Operating System - Windows XP Professional Software included - Microsoft Works 8.5, MS Office OneNote 2003, Java 2 Runtime environment, Adobe Acrobat Reader, InterVideo WinDVD 5, Sonic Solutions RecordNow! and DLA, Windows Media Player 10, Yahoo! Music Engine, McAfee VirusScan, antiSpyware, Personal Firewall Plus, SpamKiller (30-day trials); MS Office (60-day Student Teacher Ed.), AOL Unit Dimensions(WxDxH) - 15.5 x 10.8 x 1.41 (275 x 35.9 x 41.9 mm) Weight - 7.1 lbs. (3.2 Kg)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A review from someone who actually bought a P105 (finally)., April 25, 2006

By 

Troyus - See all my reviews

This review is from: Toshiba Satelllite P105-S921 17" Laptop (Intel Core Duo Processor T2400 (Centrino), 1024 MB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, DVD SuperMulti Drive) (Personal Computers)

Well if you got tired of reading peoples opinions about something THEY DO NOT EVEN OWN (ahem), good news for you is that this review is done after purchasing this laptop from Amazon.

It shipped out pretty quickly, but due to a screw up in the rebate process, the Amazon rebate was a painful event. Eventually, after going through two BAD customer service personel at Amazon (one who didn't feel like helping me, and one who accidentally hung up on me), I finally reached intelligent life over there and got it sorted out. Anyways, what follows is my review from notebookforums.com (great place to get more info...)

Toshiba Satellite P105-S921 Review

Introduction:

OK, as you probably know, the big deal here is the new Toshiba is A) The first true gaming laptop from Toshiba and B) The first laptop to be fitted with Nvidia's new Geforce 7900GS.

System Specifications:

The P105-S921 is driven by an Intel Centrino Duo (Dual Core) 1.8G CPU. , x512MB 667MHz ram, a 160GB 4200RPM Fujitsu (strange in that Toshiba makes drives of its own as well...)

The monitor is a 17" glossy , and the videocard is the 7900GS. Some new Toshiba features, such as a dual mode touchpad which you can use to launch programs as well as drive the mouse, and a fingerprint ID scanner to login to the machine with, also exist. The ID scanner is pretty cool, letting you scan in up to 20 different fingerprints, allowing mulitple fingerprint users. For more info on specs go visit Toshiba's website on the specs, as I don't see the purpose of me regurgitating specs here.

Chassis Design and Build Quality:

The design quality is acceptable, and while there are a few minor complains I have, they are mostly small annoyances. For one, the ridiculous hotkey buttons built into the laptop, and two, the LED lights which illuminate the Harmon Kardon speaker clusters... They are a little distracting, and might get me some looks at wrok... and I think about the 2 minutes of power they rob from my battery life. But that's just me. The good news is that, for 17" game capable laptop, this is a light machine, weighing in at about 7 lbs. It's also relatively thin, too. This is about as portable as 17" gets.

Screen... There is an average amount of flex to the screen, and the point between the screen hinges (where the TOSHIBA logo resides) is particularly cheesy... Pushing on the Toshiba logo will cause the screen and the frame to bend a bit. That area should have been more reinforced than it is.

Keyboard... is OK. It feels a little different to me than other laptops I have used, but works well, just makes clicky-clacky sounds. Another guy I work with said he liked it, so go figure. He owns a mac laptop anyways. YMMV. There is a bit of flex in it, but nothing too bad. It is also not fully sized... the LETTERS are sized right but some keys, like quotes and other specials chars, are 2/3rd sized instead. Personally don't dig this and whish they would have just put in a full sized keyboard - it looks like they had room to do it if they were inclined to. It does have a numpad though, which is full sized.

Sound... is amazing. As Fujitsu have mastered LCD screen and Dell has mastered 1 day coupon deals, Toshiba has taken audio to a new level with these speakers. I'm not afraid to say that I have what you'd call a golden ear, after countless bands and years of playing and composing... and the fidelity of what comes out of this laptop with regards to sound is far and away, the best I have ever heard on stock speakers.

Performance:

In order to gauge system performance, I loaded 3dMark05 and 06. Stock drivers, no tweaks, and this is what you get:

3DMark2005: 6202

3DMark2006: 3766

While that isn't as high as the 7800 GTX's I have a feeling that if one wanted to overclock this card, they could easily... The laptop does not get very hot at all, even under gaming conditions. There is a fan that will turn on ocassionally, with venting to the rear left side of the laptop. And then there is the 90nm construction of the 7900.. which makes it more overclockable than say, a 110nm 7800.

HDD:

RANDACC: 19.9ms

AVG READ: 25.9 MB/S

Battery Life:

Battery life seems very good, around 2.5 hours initially.

Conclusion:

This laptop meets my expectations. My other (cheaper) option was the MSI-1039 but I finally decided the screen and the videocard advantages of this model compelled me to take the plunge. As a technology consultant, and a gamer (sometimes) and someone who was looking to replace their desktop... it achieves what is required. For someone trying to meet all three goals (Work, Play, Home) this is good stuff, and not too badly priced either. For people who want a business laptop, there are cheaper, lighter solutions. For gaming only, a hot running, power sucking 7800GTX in a thick brick of a laptop is the way to go. And for those who want truest of DTR's, you would want a slightly larger keyboard. Thus, a good compromise of all three would result in something called the Toshiba Satellite P105-S921.

Pros:

Very portable (for 17") and thin.

Very strong GPU Performance

Runs very cool

Harman/Kardon speaker system (WOW!)

Light relative to features

Fingerprint ID system

Price-Performance ratio very good (1850.00 OTD via Amazon.com)

Looks sleek.

Cons:

LCD screen resolution (YMMV, personally I like this resolution, but it isn't as high as some others)

Drive speed is only 4200 RPM, and considering the speed benefits of 7200RPM, what were they thinking, exactly?

Good, but not great, color warmth from screen.

Flexy Screen

Laptop finish around keyboard is sprayed on silver, this will wear away showing the grey/black finish beneath eventually.

Average Build Quality (Fujitsu is better, HP is better. This reminds me of Dell.)

NO "clean" XP CD. (Toshiba will NOT send you an XP CD WITHOUT AOL crap, Yahoo Crap, and alllll kinds of other Crap, preloaded for your disenjoyment.) They even train the technicians to believe that no such XP CD's exist at Toshiba without these programs! Maybe that makes sense if you're not a computer engineer. If you are, it sounds plain ignorant. I had to spend several hours cleaning the registry.

But overall, I'm really happy with it, works great for looking at code or spreadsheets or databases, and plays games like FEAR well also. Funny to think it will be obsolete in just a couple years! ;)

23 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great price, but Toshiba isn't perfect, April 19, 2006

By 

C. Toundas (Yorkville, Ohio United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Toshiba Satelllite P105-S921 17" Laptop (Intel Core Duo Processor T2400 (Centrino), 1024 MB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, DVD SuperMulti Drive) (Personal Computers)

I have a P25-S607 and I can tell you that Toshiba laptops are generally built well aside from one major component, the hard drive. They tend to last around 1.5-2 years. If you search forums for P series discussions, you will find this happens to most owners of these laptops. However, the hard drive is not difficult to replace. In 1.5-2 years, you will be able to purchase a bigger/faster hard drive and easily install it. A word of advice on HD installation; be careful with the HD pin cover. It is not difficult to install, but you have to make sure it is lined up properly or you can easily damage it. Another problem area with Toshibas is an occasionally crappy optical drive. However, you will probably end up replacing this drive in a few years anyway with a blue ray or HD-DVD drive when the prices go down. They are also not difficult to replace, but require a little more time with a screwdriver in order to replace.

The core duo processor is very fast for its clock speed, so do not let the low frequency (1.83 GHz) fool you. The performance of this processor is roughly equivalent to the Athlon X2 3800+ in most areas, but not in gaming. AMD still owns the gaming segment until the launch of Conroe. However, this processor is a much better processor than anything with netburst architecture. It may fall short of a 3.73 GHz Pentium D EE in performance but it uses a tiny fraction of the power of that Pentium D and produces far less heat. Personally, I think the 2.0 GHz Core Duo would have been more appropriate for this computer, but the 1.83 is still no slouch.

The Geforce 7900 is an excellent graphics card that will allow you to play anything out there, albeit not on the absolute highest settings. A desktop SLI rig is obviously going to be much more powerful than a single GPU laptop. This GPU is also not upgradeable, which gives many people reservations about a gaming laptop. Alienware laptops have upgradeable GPUs, but are insanely expensive. Plus, you simply cannot overclock the processor on any mainstream computer, including this one. However, you can overclock the GPU with Rivatuner or whatever software you prefer, but watch out, overclocked laptop GPUs tend to overheat.

The weight and sheer bulk of a 17" laptop make them mobile only when compared to a desktop. This is not for a road warrior. However, moving this computer from room to room will be much easier than trying to move a desktop around. Personally, I move mine all over the house but rarely take it out of the house.

This computer is windows Vista ready with one caveat; most experts agree that 2 gigs of RAM will be necessary to fully enjoy Vista. Two gigs of RAM also improve game play, so it will probably be the fist upgrade made by most gamers that purchase it. RAM is not difficult to swap in these laptops, it is as simple as removing a plate and unsnapping it, then snapping in the new ram and screwing the plate back on.

Overall, if you know what you are doing, have around $2,000 to spend on a laptop, and actually want a gaming laptop, go ahead and buy this one. You won't find a better gaming laptop for the price.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Laptop, April 11, 2006

By 

bob - See all my reviews

This review is from: Toshiba Satelllite P105-S921 17" Laptop (Intel Core Duo Processor T2400 (Centrino), 1024 MB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, DVD SuperMulti Drive) (Personal Computers)

I purchased this laptop for college. I am going into computer programming/game programming. This laptop is fantastic. The proc is fast, as is the video card. My pc has a 6800gs in it and this video card is far faster. In outdoor areas of Oblivion, my pc would average about 20fps. With the same settings this laptop averages 30 fps. The dual core processor is nice since while playing games, if you need to get to the desktop, alt-tab works instantly. You can even have 2 games running at once. I would have prefered more than 1 gb, or not having both slots occupied. The hard drive is a tad slow also, but gigantic for a laptop. Since you can upgrade to 2gb for about 160, that is not such a big deal since you dont need it right away. The speakers are phenominal for a laptop. they would never replace a surround sound setup, but they are good for most tasks. The laptop is solid and light weight for a desktop replacement. I found the screen to be beautiful. Some people complain about the resolution, but i think it is fine. Nothing looks to small on it, and if the resolution were higher, you would be unable to play games at the native resolution well. The keyboard is better than the one on my HP laptop. It is clicky and responsive, Key size takes a bit to get used to but is not bad.

This laptop is an excelent performer for hundreds less then the comperable dellienware