badly designed (Toshiba Satellite P10-554)

Member Name: gump103

Product:	Toshiba Satellite P10-554
Date:	29/08/08 (239 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: good screen, quality feel

Disadvantages: flawed cooling, heavy

I own the p10-873 version of this laptop which I initially bought as a semi desktop replacement about 3 years ago. The chassis is the same as the 554 but the processor is 3.2ghz and the graphics card is an ATI radeon mobility 9700 with 64mb of vram.

The laptop is able to run windows xp with ease but not Vista as ati never released a driver for the AGP bus, as such the graphics card never installs.

The screen is a nice clear 15.4" 1280x800 panel that produces a really good picture.

The keyboard and case are sturdy and the touchpad is fast and responsive.

The laptop has 3 usb 2.0 ports along with a VGA and tv out.

I have had several problems with this laptop though, that may be to do with me going for the most powerful model, in that the cooling capabilities are wholely inadequate. When using the processor at full speed the fans speed up to maximum and the whole laptop shuts down. To make sure it wasn't faulty fans I brought some replacements and had exactly the same problem. Due to this I have had to run the laptop's CPU in medium mode for almost its entire life.

As they are no longer produced you may be reading this review with a view of picking one up second hand. I can't recommend that you do as the heat problems I believe will affect all of them due to bad design.

Summary: badly designed laptop

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