  | Toshiba Satellite 3005-S304 Notebook (1-GHz Pentium III, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive)
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Average user rating:  | |
| Excellent value for money | |
| I have had this Laptop with the XP pro version on it since Nov, I knew the specs of it before i bought it. I also knew that i could not get a comparable Laptop for the same price anywhere else..The graphics card is the icing on the cake. It runs superbly, does everything you could ask without fault. I know people complain about the ticking of the hard drive, but its not something that is likely to make you not buy it, although i am surprised that Toshiba still use such a low speed Hard Drive 4200 rpm, nevertheless its still quick.. I reccomend it wholeheartedly. | |
| Great graphics chip | |
| After much research, I chose this machine because of its combination of features, weight, and price. What I didn't expect was the excellent graphics chip on this. The machine comes with a Nvidia GeForce2Go with a 166Mhz DDR bus and a 16Mb DDR video memory. This is in contrast with many laptops that use slower graphics chip or use onboard graphics that share memory with the main RAM. The range of graphics modes supported is quite impressive. Of course the 14" TFT screen only supports 1024x768, but I have it configured now to simultaneously drive an external monitor at a total of 2048x768! That's right, I have a horizontally spanning virtual display where I can mouse from my TFT to my 19" analog monitor. Having the dual displays is fantastic! Works great in WinXP and you get so much more screen real estate. Alternately, you can choose to drive your external display exclusively at high resolutions like 1600x1200 or 1920x1440. Note: on this machine there are 3 USB ports, but no PS/2 ports for an external keyboard or mouse. You will need a USB keyboard or mouse if you want to use an external one or get a USB-PS/2 adapter. | |
| Great price, great features! | |
| This notebook has pretty much everything you could want in a notebook! It's a very nice package with a great balance of features, size, and battery life. The price is right too. It suspends and resumes in under 5 seconds each, is very stable (no crashes yet!), and solidly built. Having everything you need such as Firewire and 10/100 Ethernet built in saves you the cost of adding these feature and carrying around additional components. The DVD/CD-RW combo is nice as well. The only thing I would have liked to have seen is scroll buttons to accompany the touchpad like some other notebooks have. Regarding the users complaining about the drive clicking, it is completely normal! ALL drives make some noise when they access the disk, some are louder than others. The drive in this notebook is probably not the quietest drive around, but it's not the loudest I've heard either. They may be complaining simply out of lack of experience with many hard drives, or not used to a notebook where you're closer to it than a desktop and the louder fans may drown out the drive sounds. |
