This a a Best Buy Blue Label Notebook. This means it was created from feedback of best buy customers and comes with some extra warranty and geek squad stuff. Honestly the whole Blue Label thing did not influence my decision to purchase one of these. When I first saw the laptop in Best Buy I was very impressed with the look, very sleek. I had been pricing out a Lenovo T410 and this coming in at over $1000 less I had to give it a try.
The Good
The 14” screen is the perfect size. I’m coming from a Dell m4400 which had a 15” screen which I felt was a bit too big for travel. The backlight keyboard is a welcome surprise on a laptop at this price level. The keyboard is a little soft for my taste but is easily adapted to quickly. There external connection options are all there and it even has an eSata port.
After putting in a 256GB SSD and 8GB of good ram this laptop really flies. I do work on VMs a lot so I was a bit worried how this would handle it but it is doing very well after my upgrades.
The price is hard to beat, at $900 including the wireless push2tv netgear hardware there are very few other choices in this category.
The Bad
The keyboard could be a bit stiffer. Upgrading the hard drive and memory involves taking out every screw that is holding the laptop together. Toshiba obviously did not intend for users to upgrade these things. Out of the box the computer felt slow with the bloatware that was installed. The factory memory is slow, I would highly recommend upgrading it. It does not come with a recovery cd or driver cd.
The Intel HD graphics are ok but if you do anything that is graphics intensive you will want a dedicated graphics card.
Bottom Line
While I really did like this laptop I ended up returning it. I need something I was going to be confident would last a couple of years which this did not fall in that category.
I ended up getting a Lenovo T410 which just arrived to today and so far is very nice.