A really good laptop at a good price (Toshiba Equium P200D 139)

Member Name: sepinroth

Product:	Toshiba Equium P200D 139
Date:	30/05/09 (379 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: speed, big screen, easiness of use

Disadvantages: battery, small problems with drivers

Hello everyone,
I have suggested this laptop to Dooyoo as I have been the lucky owner and daily user of this really good machine for the past year.
Intro:
Mine came from Currys online refurbished laptops sale for 299 GBP in June 2008. It turned out that it actually has not been used, had only been opened as a test machine, still had foil on, etc. The criteria for a laptop were as follows:
* big screen
* at least 2GB RAM (memory)
* good and fast processor (no preference to brands/types)
* pleasant look

As you can obviously guess Toshiba Equium P200D ticks all of those boxes:)
In the meantime it turned out it is really good for watching movies on that 17inch screen and reasonably good for games.
I play Sims 2 frequently with all additional cds installed and medium details in the game - runs beautifully. It has been also tested on various games from Reflexive.com (try it out) and there were never any problems with them.
However - Heroes of Might and Magic V did not go so well - too slow. I hope this gives you the idea as far as games are concerned.

I use it everyday for my translation jobs where I need to have sometimes 5 to 10 websites opened at once, online dictionaries and heavy CAT tools (translation programs) that take a lot of memory. Toshiba is the winner - working on it is flawless.

As far as OS (operating system) is concerned, I downgraded from Vista Home Edition to Windows XP SP3 to make sure no nasty surprises with the translation software will appear. Generally, it worked really well.

Enough of praise - time to point out some disadvantages:

1. In my opinion due to downgrading from Vista to Win XP the touchpad lost its perfect sensitivity and on rare occasions it seems to switch windows when you click anywhere on the screen. It does not cause any trouble - might be slighly annoying for some users.

2. Battery is not good at all - but the 17inch screen and the speed of processing comes at a price. It lasts for up to 2.5 hours with light surfing/word processing and about an hour -1.5h with gaming/films.

3.Another trouble was with sound drivers. After installing Win XP the sound was very quiet. It required some kind of additional codecs or extra bits (not sure which ones:) to make it reasonably good. Now it is absolutely fine.

No more disadvantages found so far.

And that is all, dear readers. Depending on the needs of the users it might be a really fantastic machine - as in my case - or a nightmare to type - as in my nervous partner's case:)))

Summary: I wouldn't change it ever:)

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