#1: Toshiba Mini NB305-N440BN 10.1-Inch Java Brown Netbook (8 Hour Battery Life) Reviews!
I bought this in June 2010, I don't know if that's after all the hoopla about the memory upgrade or not. I got the extra memory as I knew I'd need it, stuck it in and booted up without a problem. I installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64 (64bit), formatting the main partition of the hard drive in the process to get rid of all the bloatware and stuff I didn't want. I left the little factory image partition alone in case I didn't like the results with W7Ux64, but it runs W7 Ultimate x64 very, very well with the 2 GB's of RAM. The Toshiba website had all the drivers for everything I needed in the Windows 7 x64 configuration. I'm very happy with this little guy.
I'm an IT Pro, I don't do a lot of what other users of this computer might want it for. I use it for remote controlling other computers a lot, for instance. It's great to carry this little computer around the job site, I can be logged onto the domain controller while working on and troubleshooting the whole installation, adding new workstations to the domain, etc. It's one of my favorite tools in my inventory and because it's so small it goes everywhere with me. I can use it to remote into my main server and get software, access other client systems, it does everything I want it to and it does it very well.
To give you folks an idea of some of the other things I use it for;
I have a mount for it in my vehicle. I don't need or want 3/4G (wireless broadband internet that uses a cellular phone connection) because I can't use the internet while I'm driving anyway and everywhere I need it there's wifi. In an emergency I can just pull into any apartment complex and use inSSIDer to find an available network. Thanks to all of you who don't know how to or can't be bothered to secure your wireless, it's never a problem getting connected. I'm not doing anything malicious to anyone so don't get your undies in a bundle. There are also many businesses with free wifi so given the choice I'll use those networks rather than piggyback someones private, unsecured home network.
I use it when I take my nephew to Karate, I log onto the Karate Dojo's wireless (which I installed for them) and watch Netflix to pass the time. The computer connects easily to the AUX input on my car stereo so I have great sound to go with my viewing while I wait comfortably in my vehicle.
Being as the computer connects to my car stereo I have 60Gb of music to listen to when I'm driving. I never listen to the radio and I never listen to music I don't like. I had to tweak the hard disk shock protection settings a little, and the file buffering on WinAmp (that's what I use for playing music) but it works great. I have my music organized into play lists so a couple taps on the keyboard and I've got just what I want without being distracted from my driving.
On the rare occasions when I have time to grill a steak, I take the Toshiba outside and watch TV or whatever streamed from my main computer in the house. Windows Media Center connects directly to the monster that acts as a server in my home. No more twiddling my thumbs while the charcoal gets hot. I hate gas grills, btw.
I use the little guy constantly while sitting in the cattle section on airliners. I can listen to music or watch any number of movies that I've pre-loaded onto the machine before leaving home. I recently flew from the west coast to the east coast. I used it during the flights and layovers. I can make it from Los Angeles to anywhere on the east coast without running out of battery, that's pretty impressive. I get anywhere from 8 hours to several days on a battery charge, depending on how I use the computer. I have an inverter in the car so it's always charging while it's mounted in the vehicle.
I use it with my telescope to display sky maps for finding interesting things. I took it to the boonies for the Perseid meteor shower and it ran all night with battery charge to spare. Bear in mind that the computer isn't in constant use on these occasions and sleeps a lot of the time, but still it's nice not to have to find someplace to plug it in every couple hours. I have on several occasions forgotten to plug it in to grid power and left it in my computer bag, sleeping. Once it went for 3 days, used for what I needed and wanted it for, before the little 6 cell battery gave up. It's got impressive battery time.
So, maybe I got lucky or maybe some of the people that review this little machine don't know how to use it or have unreasonable expectations but from my experience it's a great little soldier. I haven't had a lick of trouble with it, not one issue. Oh, I take that back, with Win7 Ult. x64 the wifi power toggle doesn't work, wifi stays on all the time. I don't really care so I'm not docking a star for that. That's the ONLY thing I can think of that doesn't work as well or better than expected with a little 1.6 x2 Atom processor and 2Gb of RAM. I think I'm getting my money's worth out of this machine, and more.
I find that mine is very solidly built, the construction "feels" good and solid. The screen is sharp and crisp and the LED backlighting makes it easy on the eyes. The touch pad works fine but I don't like touch pads so I have a little mouse that I use whenever possible. At my desk I dock it to a larger monitor and full sized keyboard and mouse and that works very good too.
Speaking of getting lucky, I've noticed something that's kind of weird. I see a lot of cases where something I've researched as much as I did this purchase later gets a bunch of bad reviews that are way outside of and opposed to my experience. Either I'm very, very fortunate, God is blessing me, or there are a lot of people out there that don't know what they're doing. Computers are like cars, telescopes, and other complex machines, they have a definite learning curve and if you really don't understand them, best leave tinkering with the innards to someone who knows what goes where. Just a thought... Of course in the case of Toshiba giving people the wrong specs, well shame on them. I hardly ever have to call tech support so I can't vouch for Toshiba support one way or the other.
This is NOT the "laptop equivalent of a desktop", this is a netbook or as Toshiba calls it a mini-notebook. It's very small and it's not suited to more intensive computer applications than what it was designed for. It's not meant to replace a full size laptop or desktop computer. If you don't know the difference go to a store and look at one and try it out, then come back here and buy it because this is the best price I could find and I looked pretty hard.
Now, having said all of that, this is a fine machine in the Toshiba tradition. It performs flawlessly for what I use it for and the memory upgrade I installed in it worked without a hitch. The Operating System Properties page is showing 2Gb of RAM so it's doing what it's supposed to do. I use a 2Gb flash drive for ReadyBoost when I need the extra performance. ReadyBoost is a feature of Windows 7, it allows you to use a USB flash drive to act as additional memory, very handy on a computer that only accepts 2GB of RAM. If you have a little computer like this and don't know what ReadyBoost is, it's worth the effort to look it up and get a little flash drive to dedicate to it. When you plug in a formatted, empty flash drive the computer will give you the option of using it for ReadyBoost so it doesn't take a systems engineer to set it up, it's very easy.
Another tip for getting the most out of a small system like this. Lose that silly wallpaper. I have my desktop set to solid black but any solid color is the same. You're forcing the processor and video hardware to redraw that huge picture file of your kid, cat, dog, vacation, whatever, 60 times a second. It never ceases to amaze me that people will take a little machine like this and put a 5MB picture up as wallpaper, then complain because their computer is slow. That's an extra 300 megabytes a second, almost 15 gigabytes a minute, in system overhead. That's also a lot more drain on the battery. Just for a picture you never look at when you're actually using the computer because whatever you're doing is covering it up with it's own window anyway. I suspect that this is the reason Windows 7 Starter doesn't have the ability to change the desktop wallpaper, so that people don't put up huge picture files and then call Microsoft and whine because their computer is slow.
Anyone can get a lemon from any manufacturer of anything. Getting a bad machine isn't really a downcheck for Toshiba as long as they stand behind the warranty. It's a drag but it's not the end of the world. If their quality control were more stringent these things would cost a lot more, defeating the whole purpose of an inexpensive netbook. There's no guarantee that just because it worked when they tested it that you won't have a failure. Send it back and get on with life until your new machine arrives. If you stop buying a particular brand because you experience a warranty covered failure, eventually you're going to run out of brands to buy.
I'd like to touch a little more on the quality control issue. That goes for anything computer-wise. Microsoft could make bullet-proof operating systems, they'd cost ,000 a copy. Modern hard drives almost all have bad sectors, you don't notice it because those are marked by the disk controller as unusable. If they made them all perfect they would cost ten times as much as they do and no one would buy them, they'd buy the regular drives and ignore the bad sectors like we do anyway. There's a trade off between being competitive and being flawless but expensive. That's why reputable companies have good warranty service, they KNOW they're going to let some stinkers get out on the open market and they're standing by to take up that slack. I'll take 95% and cheap over 100% and I-can't-afford-it-no-matter-what expensive any day. You can't expect perfection and this is why. Your best bet is, no matter what kind of hardware you get, to use the crap out of it when you first get it. Stress it, run it, play with it, make it work hard. That way any failure should show up sooner rather than later. Don't baby it and don't abuse it. Computer equipment has a thing called "burn in" where the circuits get "used" to being used, sooner is better than later.
There are two different computers with two different processors in this family. If you have the BLACK cased computer, that's not the same as this one. It's got a different processor in it and that machine will accept DDR3 RAM, this machine will only accept DDR2 RAM so you have to be sure you're getting the right RAM for the right computer. I suspect that's why so many people have been having problems with the RAM upgrade but I can't be sure without actually seeing their machines. Check, then double check, before buying RAM. I bought the RAM upgrade but I checked the RAM specs, the chipset specs, and the processor specs before I ordered it.
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Toshiba Mini NB305-N440BN 10.1-Inch Java Brown Netbook (8 Hour Battery Life) Features
- 1.66 GHz Intel Atom N455 processor
- 1 GB DDR3 RAM
- 250 GB SATA hard drive
- 10.1-inch LED backlit widescreen display; Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3150 video processor
- Microsoft Windows 7 Starter, 8.3 hours of battery life
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