» Toshiba: Right On » Midnight Cheese

Toshiba: Right On

Merredith bought a laptop several months ago with XP preinstalled but was eligible for a Vista upgrade DVD to come in the mail at a later date. So the DVD arrived with plenty of warning: “For Toshiba computers only.” I put the disk in my desktop machine and upon autoplay a dialog box shows up saying, “For Toshiba computers only.” Just for the heck of it I ran the setup program direct. Long story short I have Vista installed on my desktop.

Not that Vista is anything worth mentioning, but the lame attempt by Toshiba to keep people from putting that Vista upgrade on anything but Toshiba product was awesome.

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Cale

My desktop is a couple years old(Pentium D), but I haven't really used Vista enough on that machine to say anything about it. However, just setting up Merredith's machine on the home network and such, Vista does feel much more solid than XP. The only weird thing is settings and control panels are more difficult to get to, often buried several clicks deep with lots of explanation text of what you're clicking on.

We've got some ancient IBM laptops at work that just continue to chug along. Very tank-like.

jrenaut

I just found out that the giant douchebag I work with has a Toshiba, so that's out. I have an HP at work, and it's not too bad.

Lenovo/IBM computers are kind of expensive, aren't they?

Jim.

In general, Toshibas are pretty low quality laptops. I have an older one that used to overheat all the time. Toshiba "fixed" it by releasing a BIOS patch that throttled the processor down 40%, so it didn't produce as much heat. I think there was a lawsuit over that and a few lawyers got some good money. Also it had a really messed up APM/ACPI implementation that nothing could handle, except Windows with its specially supplied drivers from Toshiba, so it was pretty much a bust in the Linux/BSD arena too.

The best supported laptops for Linux I have found are Lenovo/IBM ones. My brother's old HP used to run Ubuntu just fine.

Anyway, I'm not too keen on getting Vista just yet. I'm curious about the new stuff for programming though, but that would be the only thing driving me toward it at this point. Are you running it on your old desktop, or did you get a newer one that has more power behind it?

Cale

I think they totally did the bare minimum just to appease M$.

The laptop actually had to be returned. It began to regularly lock-up on boot-up, even after doing a fresh system reinstall. Eventually it wouldn't boot at all. So it was returned and Merredith ended up getting an HP. It was one of the smaller models... 14" screen. The HP has been great. It's light and it functions, so that's definitely a good thing. If I had to buy a laptop to run Linux on, I would probably buy one of those, assuming there are drivers for all the hardware. Definitely a nice little laptop.

jrenaut

Do you think Toshiba did the bare minimum to comply with whatever licensing deal they signed, or do you think their security people are just incompetent?

Also, how's the laptop? I'm looking to replace mine sometime in the near future.