April 22, 2008

Review on Toshiba Satellite A215-S5849, a brief presence in Amazon's top best selling laptops


Last day I noticed a brief presence on the 5th place of the Amazon.com’s best selling laptop list, the Toshiba Satellite A125-S5849 laptop. Today it’s on the 42nd place. Brief presence but it was there, therefore I will say something about it. Technical details:
· Bright 15.4-inch LCD accented with an onyx blue metallic LCD cover and webcam integrated into bezel
· 2.0 GHz 64-bit AMD Turion 64 TL-60 processor, 200 GB hard drive, 2 GB RAM (4 GB max), dual-layer DVD drive (with Labelflash disc printing)
· 54g Wi-Fi (802.11b/g); 10/100 Ethernet; integrated ATI Radeon X1200 graphics (up to 319 MB of available memory)
· Connectivity: 4 USB, 1 FireWire, 1 VGA, 1 S-Video, 1 headphone, 1 microphone, 1 ExpressCard 34/54
· Pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium (with Media Center capabilities)
Preloaded software: Microsoft Works 9.0, Google Desktop and Picasa, Ulead DVD MovieFactory 5, Norton 360 All-in-One Security (30-day trial), and Microsoft Office 2007 Home and Student Edition (60-day trial). The box contains the A215-S5849 notebook PC, rechargeable lithium-ion battery, AC adapter, and operating instructions. It is backed by a one-year limited hardware warranty. Approximate Unit Dimensions - 14.3 (W) x 10.5 (D) x 1.55 (H) Approximate Unit Weight - 5.78 pounds. When normal used, I mean surfing and office software the battery will last for about 2 and a half hours. I have to remind you that this model from Toshiba is part of the recently (April 1,2008) updated Satellite® A200 series laptops. The main and most needed update is the system memory increase to 2 GB from the previous 1 GB. This memory amount increase will help to a better running of Windows Vista OS. In this price bracket the big players this year seem to be the Toshiba Satellite A210/A200, Dell Vostro 1000 and Acer Aspire 47xx and 55xx Gemstone series. All are good choices. Where the Toshiba having an edge over the Vostro 1000 is in the buyer's ability to walk into a store and touch/feel the notebook. Things like keyboard and design are very personal and hard to convey in a small web photograph. Aesthetically the Toshiba is better looking. The Vostro can be bought with Windows XP - a vastly superior Operating System for PCs. The Dell has a more orthodox keyboard layout - for a lot of people this alone could be the clincher. It also comes with a smaller 120GB HDD, but is spins faster. Comparing the A210 to Acer's Aspire, the chassis is nicer on the Toshiba. The two Acer notebooks at this price both had Celeron CPUs - one was spec'ed with 512MB RAM and an 80GB HDD. So the Toshiba has an edge in terms of performance and specifications. Like the Dell, Acer uses a standard keyboard layout. When searched thru users comments I noticed two main issues. First was about screen going blank, and the solution seems to be a bios update. If you are not so much of a computer connoisseur that can be a big issue because Toshiba official support looks to be a little confused about this hardware problem and often blaming Vista for it. The second issue is about battery life being around 2 hours. The Satellite A215-S5849 laptop best feature seems to be the good quality of picture the display provides. In conclusion, if u are not a power user or a gamer and keep the expectations appropriate to it’s entry level line u can be satisfied by its performance, and, of course, if with this recent April updated line of laptops Toshiba fixed the blank screen problem.
Latter edit: Amazon.com seems to have the best deal on this laptop with the 699$ offer.

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