16 responses so far ↓

• 1 Goldwyn

  I needed a third computer for use when I was away from my desktop system and ultra portable light weight.

  I chose this system which had the better processor but the video processor intergrated with the chip.

  Clearly, for hard gamers and intensive video processing, the systems with the seperate video memory is necessary. However, for surfing the net or performing editing, the system is fine.

  I have had no problems with Vista 64. The sytem booted up without a problem and instantly connected with my WIFI /n system.

  There is a fair amount of crapware, but it can be easily removed through a variety of programs or simply removing the programs in the uninstall aspect of the control panel.

  The screen is great and the key board is one of the nicest I’ve had in a laptop.

  For the price, the system has a great screen, excellent keyboard, DVD/CD player and burner with a fast chip and tons of RAM.

  I would not hesitate to recommend this unit to anyone. Gamers will need a faster video card

• 2 Ragle

  I’ve had this laptop for just over a week. I was slightly skeptical about running Vista, but I’ve had no problems with it thus far. This is my second Toshiba – my first is four years old and cost more than double this one at the time. For $650, this is a great deal. I was worried the screen was too big at first (yes, too big!) but I love it for watching Hulu, videos, etc. It’s not heavy, although I don’t move it very much from my desk. Battery life is OK – not Toshiba’s strong suit by any means, but it’s not terrible. You just have to remember to run it down periodically. In terms of bloatware – not horrible. Easy to delete. In terms of restore disks – you can create them with the utility provided. I made three backup DVDs the first day I had it, no problems. As far as the fingerprints go – yeah, it’s kind of an issue, but it’s not terrible. You get used to it or you use the microfiber cloth provided to wipe them off. Generally speaking, I am very happy with this machine. It has plenty of RAM, disk space, etc. For the casual home user, it’s perfect. I’m not a gamer or website developer, so I don’t require a ton of power. Bang for the buck, it’s fantastic.

  Drawback: periodically, my typing skips around on the screen. Not sure if this is because I type very fast, or a flaw in the OS, or what — but it’s annoying. Not insurmountable, but annoying.

• 3 Joseph

  This computer is very fast after 4-days of configurations/tune-ups. No complain about the hardware, or Vista (Vista is actually very good, but I’m buying this one in order to upgrade it to Windows 7). After I deleted most of the crapware, the computer ranked to be ‘top 12% computers in the world’ by PCPitStop.com. Now with all kinds of software installed, including Windows 7 RC on drive E:, 2 external hard drives hooked up, it is a ‘top 18%’ computer when running at full power/High Performance (Balanced and Power Saver dropped it to 28% and below 48% respectively).

  The computer unboxed with warped keyboard which I have to push it down hard in order to settle it in, but the function key portion is still higher than the frame in the middle. One very noticeable thing is that the computer’s touch pad, wrist rest areas are very hot. the touch pad chrome buttons are hot like a coffee mug at all time. Don’t know whether this will be a trouble or not for me in the future.

• 4 O'Neal

  this is a nice machine. here is some pro and cons

  pros= alot of memory
  big hard drive for a laptop
  free upgrade to windows 7
  nice speakers
  web cam
  cons= no restore disk
  vista 64 bit
  show fingerprints on black finish
  alot of junk software that you got to remove

• 5 Bassett

  I researched a lot of laptops and was very pleased to find my first choice on Amazon. I got it brand new, packed beautifully, the laptop is beautiful..better than I ever expected. Is really fast. Then to top it off… before I recieved it I noticed it went down 50.00. I called Amazon and they were so gracious to take the 50.00 off for me. I recieved it quickly…great deal.

• 6 O'Bryant

  As with others who were lucky enough to come across
  the NB205-310, I went to MC recently to see their NB205
  on sale for $349. I was almost read to pop for that one,
  but asked the guy if it had bluetooth and he said another
  model had bluetooth (the 310) and he had some in stock.

  In short, as others have observed, this is now the netbook
  to beat in terms of construction and design. It’s a real
  beauty, from the patterned lid and keyboard to the hinge —
  even the bottom just speaks quality.

  I’m glad to have been able to upgrade to an Atom 280 machine.
  I was a NC-10 user, and actually had no problem with the
  Samsung’s small trackpad, which has been enlarged on the NC110
  and NC-120. The glide function in the Synaptics software
  actually makes using small trackpads a breeze.

  But the Toshiba is a whole different animal — beautifully
  large track pad and actual real front buttons that are
  easy to use.

  My only gripe, as others observe, is the huge bezel around
  the screen. But in a way it actually makes the computer
  look pretty nice. And for my uses (I already have another
  Tohisba U205-5067 with a small screen, and a Dell 1330) I
  don’t want anything bigger than 10.1 inches — 11 inch
  would be the max.

  Finally, Tohisba is now putting that great Config Free
  program back in their laptops. I adopted it for use on
  my Dell, and it’s great on the NB205!

• 7 Rocha

  Well I have been doing research and playing with netbooks for several months now. I had to replace my aging 5 year old HP that was recently stolen. I wanted something with a long battery life and was extremely small and portable.
  I rolled down to my local best buy on July 4th and I was hell bent on getting the ASUS 1000HE. I found out that the model they sold only had the Atom 270, but I wanted the Black Tie warranty so I was going to live with that. However, when I got there, they did not have any in stock. In fact, the only netbook that had the Atom 280 was the Toshiba NB 205. I never even heard of it. I found out that they were out of stock so I ran home and called until I found a best buy that had one in stock. I read some reviews but they were dismal at best.
  After playing with it non stop for 3 days, here is what I like about it.
  1. The Case is much better looking than any other netbook out there. It even looks nicer than the Mac Books. It is much nicer than the ASUS 1000HE.
  2. The screen is very crisp and bright. It also has 8 levels of brightness.
  3. The Keys are very nice to type on and are spaced out well.
  4. The touchpad is responsive and the left and right keys are placed like a normal laptop.
  5. Although it took some time to get the wireless working, it hooks up faster than my other 2 laptops.
  6. It runs XP so with some minor tweaks, it ran just as fast as my other laptops.
  7. It plays MP4 movies/videos very well.
  8. It handles office applications like Excel and Access very well.
  9. I was able to watch 3 full length MP4 movies and still have over half the battery life left.
  10. It boots up fast and it has no problem with multiple windows.
  11. Netflix live stream videos work great on it.
  12. 3 USB Ports (one can charge while it is off), 1 VGA Port, 1 RJ45 Port, and a SD Port.

  Now on to what I don’t like.
  1. The back of the battery does stick out another inch but it does seem to act like a bumper. I bought a Targus bag with a handle and it fits perfectly.
  2. The speaker is very inadequate, the earphone jack works well.
  3. The Wireless setup was a pain. I wish it had a dedicated switch.
  4. The instruction manual is almost useless.
  5. Can’t really adjust the screen resolution (although the stock settings are fine).

  All in all it was a pleasant surprise and I am glad I waited to buy.

• 8 Maldonado

  I have had the NB205 frost white version (the $399 price) for about a week.

  Good points:
  1) build quality seems high compared to other netbooks that I looked at.
  2) keyboard and touchpad are very usable.
  3) the NB205 looks great (my opinion).
  4) screen is bright and usable outdoors. There is a glossy finish but compared to glossy notebooks that I have, the NB205 seems better.
  5) Battery life seems to be good. Using full power and bright screen, the batter lasts over 6 hours. With battery saving features enabled, would last longer.

  Bad points:
  1) Speaker is terrible. I use earbuds which work fine.
  2) Many special Toshiba programs used to control hardware and do different system tasks. This only a bad point if you are thinking of upgrading to Windows 7 because it may make the upgrade harder (are there Windows 7 versions available of these programs, etc.).

  I upgraded the memory to 2GB. This did not seem to make a significant difference in performance. Perhaps someone who runs more demanding programs might have a different result.

  Overall, I am very satisfied with the unit but one must keep in mind there are limitations when using netbooks.

• 9 Unell

  I ordered my Toshiba mini-computer from Amazon on Tuesday and got it on Thursday.
  I have a 5 year old Toshiba laptop which works fine so I know Toshiba computers work well.
  I am mobile impaired so I need a light, easy-to-use computer. This mini-computer fills that need.
  This could rank as one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. I have had this for three days now. It is so much fun to play with, I haven’t turned it off except to eat.
  It has a fast boot time. The design is excellent.
  I have researched all the current netbooks available right now. This one wins hand-down. The keyboard is easy to type on. The screen is clear and easy to read.
  The touchpad takes some getting used to. It can be used to scroll vertically or horizontally. It tells you how to do this in the manual. What the manual doesn’t tell you is that a quick finger movement at the top edge to the left brings you to the previous window. A similar movement to the right brings you to the next window you were looking at. The same is true when using the internet. Left movement take you to the previous page – right takes you to the next page. This was particularly annoying before I figured out what was going on.
  The speaker is totally inadequate. Most applications don’t require a good speaker. This computer has Bluetooth. There are many Bluetooth stereo headphones and speakers out there – so perhaps this will not be too much of a problem. I listened to a couple of tunes on Pandora with a set of plug-in headphones. The sound quality was great. I also watched a Netflix movie. The video quality was excellent.
  Overall, this netbook is excellent choice for me. If I was going to rate this on a scale of 1-10, I would give it a 9.5, but since I cannot use that rating system here, I guess I’ll give it 5 stars.

• 10 Rosales

  I just got my NB205 last Saturday. So these are initial, early impressions.

  #1 (terrible first impression): It took all afternoon and into the evening to get the unit talking to my LinkSys WRT54G wireless router. The wireless communication was connected, the router had assigned an IP address, but the NB205 refused to get it. It sat at “acquiring IP address” until it timed out. I have a static IP block reserved on my router, so I gave the NB205 a static IP address and filled in the gateway and DNS server IPs, and it *still* wouldn’t talk. In technical parlance, it wasn’t just a problem with ARP – the entire transport layer simply wasn’t working.

  A wired connection to the router worked fine. But that wasn’t a workaround that I was prepared to accept.

  I researched on the Web and found that various Toshiba models seem to have a lot of trouble with wireless, and that there are probably a hundred different things that people said finally got theirs working.

  What finally worked for me was to turn off WEP security on both the router and the NB205. That immediately got them talking, at the expense of breaking all of my other wireless links (two computers and a Wii). Then I turned WEP back on, and they stayed talking. No problems since.

  #2 (good): The battery life is pretty danged long. Maybe not the claimed nine hours, but seven or eight (with WiFi turned off and using power-saver profile). I suspect that a good part of that comes from using an e-IPS display.

  #3 (bad but expected): The manual is provided on the hard drive, not in print. The manual is disorganized and mostly useless. This seems to be par for the course for modern computers.

  #4 (very slightly bad): The manual says that if you shut the unit down by closing the lid (sleep mode, hibernate, or whatever) that when you open the lid it’ll start back up. It doesn’t. You have to press the power button.

  #5 EDITED: (very annoying until I figured out what was wrong): I had given up on using Sleep/Standby mode because about half of the time when I turned it back on the unit completely rebooted. Hibernate mode always seemed to work. The problem turned out to be that one of the latches for the battery pack wasn’t locked, and the netbook would lose power if the unit was lifted in a way that tried to separate the pack from the main unit. So it was my own error, but I learned to pay attention to those latches.

  #6 (generally good): I got this netbook specifically for writing. The keyboard seemed to be the best available in the netbook form factor, and I’m finding the keyboard to be quite usable for extended typing sessions. A couple of keys got relocated into funky positions, though. (Maybe other netbook keyboards do the same, I don’t know.)

  #7 (good): The touchpad is the first one that I’ve found to be actually usable.

  #8 (mildly concerning): I had to turn off the vibration alerts because every time I click the touchpad, it sets off the vibration detector.

  So… good keyboard, good touchpad, good display, good battery life. That’s what I needed, and it’s working out well. But I have collected some scars from the rough edges of getting it set up and the power on/off arrangements.

  FIVE DAYS LATER (an update): I’m really enjoying this little guy. I finally got everything configured the way that I want, and I love working with it. My only day-to-day complaint is a silly one: I sometimes write while lying down, with my legs bent and the netbook propped against my legs, and in that position the clicker buttons on the touchpad rest against my belly and tend to click when I don’t want them to. I’ve learned to use Fn-F9 to disable the touchpad while I’m doing that.

• 11 Ingersoll

  Good hardware configuration, esp. for the price; excellent for casual use. I would not recommend this machine to a tech savvy user for professional use.

  It is the best compromise that I could find between price and features. Bluetooth drivers are in it but you have to add the chip ($5 dongle and taking up a USB port). The worst compromise is it comes with almost no software, but that seems to be standard practice in the industry now.

  My complaints are the touch pad interface is intermittent making it sometimes too sensitive and other times I cannot drag the cursor anywhere, and the cursor ‘disappears’ when the memory is busy. The integrated graphics and dynamic RAM allocation can be smarter; I still have to manually clear cache to retain performance when using graphics-intensive applications.

  Read the one-star review and the responses to it about the cursor jumping to different parts of the screen during typing. Those people say it’s the touch pad picking up static from the thumb. If that’s indeed the reason for that annoying error, then it’s a design flaw. Other vendors’ touch pads don’t do this.

• 12 Philbin

  I shopped around for 6 months after my 3 year HP 9400 died—I didn’t want to make that mistake again!! I narrowed it down to Dell or Toshiba laptop, and selected the Toshiba. It has performed flawlessly in it’s first month, so I feel I made the rite choice.

• 13 Greninger

  This Toshiba laptop computer looks beautiful but come with a battery that last only for one day. The first day I use the laptop to create a copy of the rescue disk and the applications and drivers. The next day when I boot up the laptop and I find that the battery has 0% charge and cannot take charge, I have to use the laptop with the power adapter plug in. I have used many laptop computers before and the batteries last at least 2 years and this one is the worst I’ve ever met.

• 14 Ingels

  I really like this computer I have been using it now for about a month. It has good features and a plenty of space on the hard drive. This is my first Tosiba laptop and I really enjoy it. I think I might even be a convert from Dell, time will tell.

• 15 Quock

  HI EVERYBODY FROM ARGENTINA!!
  I RECOMMEND THIS NOTEBOOK FOR PERSONAL BASIC USE AND MORE. IT SEEMS A LITTLE BIG AT FIRST GLANCE, BUT WHEN YOU GET USED TO IT, IT-S GREAT.

• 16 Caldwell

  I ordered my Toshiba mini-computer from Amazon on Tuesday and got it on Thursday.
  I have a 5 year old Toshiba laptop which works fine so I know Toshiba computers work well.
  I am mobile impaired so I need a light, easy-to-use computer. This mini-computer fills that need.
  This could rank as one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. I have had this for three days now. It is so much fun to play with, I haven’t turned it off except to eat.
  It has a fast boot time. The design is excellent.
  I have researched all the current netbooks available right now. This one wins hand-down. The keyboard is easy to type on. The screen is clear and easy to read.
  The touchpad takes some getting used to. It can be used to scroll vertically or horizontally. It tells you how to do this in the manual. What the manual doesn’t tell you is that a quick finger movement at the top edge to the left brings you to the previous window. A similar movement to the right brings you to the next window you were looking at. The same is true when using the internet. Left movement take you to the previous page – right takes you to the next page. This was particularly annoying before I figured out what was going on.
  The speaker is totally inadequate. Most applications don’t require a good speaker. This computer has Bluetooth. There are many Bluetooth stereo headphones and speakers out there – so perhaps this will not be too much of a problem. I listened to a couple of tunes on Pandora with a set of plug-in headphones. The sound quality was great. I also watched a Netflix movie. The video quality was excellent.
  Overall, this netbook is excellent choice for me. If I was going to rate this on a scale of 1-10, I would give it a 9.5, but since I cannot use that rating system here, I guess I’ll give it 5 stars.

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