tombrennan.org

I’ve had this laptop for about 3 weeks and here’s what I’ve run into so far…

When I was in the market for a Windows-based PC I figured I’d go with a laptop. Prices have been dropping and performance didn’t seem to be too much of an issue for what I was planning on doing with it. The Toshiba Satellite A135-S4656 went on sale a Best Buy for $349 and jumped on it.

With an 80GB hard drive, 520 Celron, and 512 MB of ram I thought this would be good enough for some programming I was planning on doing along with the low resource e-mail and www surfing.

Let me tell you about after I brought it home:

Microsoft Vista: Vista seemed to be a cool OS at first. They’ve built in some added “security” to the OS. After a while that security got annoying, but I was able to turn it off. The OS was fine, as long as you don’t want to run anything else on it.

I tried running the iTunes installation 4 times to no avail. A confirmation to run the install came and went with no further.

I do some podcasting for Addpile.com and use a Blue Snowball USB mic. I would plug the mic in, Vista would recognize it but there would be no indication that the OS recognized the mic.

With these key and other frustrations I decided to try Ubuntu Linux on the laptop.  I ran a dual boot setup and was unable to load the proper drivers in Ubuntu for sound.  So Ubuntu was not in the cards for me.  Enter Windows XP.

I formatted the drive to see if I could run XP.  I know that XP will install iTunes and recognize my microphone.  It’s too bad that Toshiba made this laptop just for Vista.  Toshiba do not offer any drivers for this laptop to run Windows XP.  Another I should have looked at before buying this laptop.

Next came the memory.  The 512 MB of RAM was not able to run Vista.  There were countless moments that system choked upon program start-ups and other functions (save, export, etc).  I wanted to upgrade to the maximum 2 GB to run Vista smoother.   Again I chose Best Buy because they had a good deal.  Again, I struck out.  Both sticks of RAM I bought did not work.  The package I bought had “Toshiba” as a brand of laptop it would work with and the RAM speed would work.  A call to Toshiba tech support about the RAM didn’t help.  They wanted me to use their e-commerce site to buy the parts.

Next was the big one (and the one I’m currently in).  After my failed XP install I wanted to restore everything back to the factory setting.  The factory default using the Toshiba Recovery Wizard is very slow. It took the better part of 4 hours to set everything back to normal on the hard drive.  That did not include the Vista install!

After 4 hours of formatting and (I thought) partitioning the hard drive the computer rebooted.  Then I got a “hard disk error: bad partition”.  I tried to run the TRW again and that did not help.  I again called Tech Support.  They advised me to go to my local UPS Store (aka Mailboxes Etc) to drop the laptop off to get shipped to Texas for repair.  They told me it would take 5-7 business days to repair the hard drive. They would pay for shipping.
I would gather that I had a hardware issue with the drive, not a partition problem.  I’ll keep everyone posted on what I find.

written by tom