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  • piroroadkill - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    5400 RPM HDD, decent CPU hampered by terrible graphics, intentionally ruined graphics drivers, glossy screen, 10/100 ethernet?

    Pass.
  • XZerg - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    no usb3 also.

    it feels like these guys and many others purposely f**k up on AMD version to ensure they make more even though they could have sold it at a much cheaper price with all the bells than what a similar config from intel would have been.
  • alent1234 - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    it's $619. some people don't care about good graphics or USB3. some people just want a laptop to surf the internet and hold some data

    i just want something in the $600 range with a 15" screen, SB and 500GB hard drive. i use android and iOS a lot more than Windows so most of the time the laptop is off.
  • piroroadkill - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    Then why the decent CPU?

    Why the blu-ray drive?

    They're setting a standard the rest of the system utterly fails to match.
  • alent1234 - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    because this stuff is dirt cheap now. it's not like they make this stuff up. they have projected selling prices and profits per unit. they get a bill of materials from suppliers before designing something and prices probably dropped so much they can put in more hardware and still sell for a low price.

    a lot of times it's cheaper to use a more expensive part but use less parts in your products overall. think apple. it makes logistics easier and cheaper. and since toshiba is part of the blu ray consortium they are pushing their other products with this
  • Sam125 - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    I think AMD was the first to realize that there comes a point where going dirt cheap is kind of stupid when you end up with gimped/lopsided systems like this L645D which is why they're cutting the manufacturer out of the picture when it comes to choosing a balanced system architecture. That's why going SOC always made sense for AMD but not Intel.
  • quiksilvr - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    Seriously. Go to Newegg and look at the cheapest Core i3 laptops. They are all ProBookks that are mostly under $500. I'd rather get a slightly bigger laptop for less than gimp out just for "portability" (The Probooks are 5.25 lbs. That's plently portable enough)
  • mino - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    Sorry sir to spoil your party, but calling the second-best IGP (after Brazos) on the amrket a terribel graphics ?

    Well shall we talk about ALL those Intel notebooks (taking 50% of the market) selling with their IGP's ... who not only do not have the performance are not actually able to _run_most of the graphics stuff ?

    Just remember, those Intel notebooks had a similar or faster CPU on board ... and sold for much higher prices ...
  • piroroadkill - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    Do you think I'm anti-AMD or something?

    Because I'm not.
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    HD 4250 is hardly the "second-best" IGP. In order, the best IGPs at present are:
    GeForce 320M (only in MacBook)
    HD 6310 (Brazos E-series)
    Intel HD Graphics 3000 (not as compatible with games, but generally more than twice as fast as the other stuff below)
    GeForce 9400M (yup, this was still faster than the 4250!)
    HD 6250 (Brazos C-series)
    HD 4250. Yay! So I'd put it as the seventh-best IGP, or sixth-best if you want to lump the two Brazos IGPs together. (I didn't because they have wildly different clocks.)
  • ET - Saturday, March 12, 2011 - link

    It's not as if even E-350 graphics are all that great. It's hardly enough to run modern games at low settings. Maybe the Brazos gets a D, the 4250 a D-. "Terrible graphics" may be a little strong, but not terribly off the mark. Older generation Intel graphics would get an F, though the newest generation beat the 4250 in most game tests in this review.

    And don't get me wrong, I think that the E-350 is a good compromise of performance, price and power, and I think that its graphics are a decent match for the underpowered CPU. I even bought a Thinkpad X120e and I intend to play games on it. But honestly, a powerful CPU really should be accompanied by a decent GPU. Hopefully Llano will see to that. The 4250, even if it's better than older Intel IGP's, isn't a decent GPU.
  • ET - Sunday, March 13, 2011 - link

    My mistake regarding Intel IGP. I looked at the HD Graphics instead of 3000. Now that I took a second look, it's clear that even older gen Intel IGP (HD Graphics) are faster than the 4250 in most games, and current gen destroy both 4250 and E-350's 6310. So yet, 4250 is terrible. :)
  • notanakin - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    I'm just wondering what the point of the Blu-ray drive is - surely this is not a machine for viewing Blu-ray disks, given the poor screen and size. And does anyone store/backup onto Blu-ray?
  • Meaker10 - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    HDMI output, its a mobile bluray player for hooking up to a decent TV. Or watching on the go since the screen is still better than DVD quality.
  • Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    There was no mention of how quiet this thing is when playing blu rays.
  • Ushio01 - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    You can now get a blu-ray player for less than $50 Toshiba can easily buy them for far less than that. This year blu-ray will become a commodity for notebook's rather than an option.
  • piroroadkill - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    Try and find slim laptop drives that are that price.
  • ET - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    was the mention of Jarred working on low end gaming benchmarks. I'm looking forward to that very much.

    Anyway, looks like decent value for money as long as you don't want any gaming. I agree that I'd love to see higher res as standard at 14" and up. 1600x900 would be more reasonable at 14". Still, I'm not really in the market for such a laptop, and at 11.6" this resolution is decent.
  • mino - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    Second this!
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    So, here's the full game list I'm using. Some are newer but not too demanding, others are quite old. Can anyone recommend one more title, so I end up with a nice, round 20? LOL... Comments are welcome:

    Batman: Arkham Asylum
    Battlefield 2
    Civilization IV
    Civilization V
    Company of Heroes
    Crysis: Warhead
    Fallout 3
    Far Cry
    FEAR (original)
    Half-Life 2
    Half-Life 2: Episode Two
    Minecraft
    Oblivion
    Quake 4
    STALKER (original)
    Supreme Commander
    Torchlight
    Unreal Tournament 3
    World of Warcraft
  • Taft12 - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    Starcraft II has higher requirements than the rest of this list, but it is the most popular PC game on the market by a mile. Please include it (low settings of course)
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    This is the list of *old* games I'm testing. Anything on the current list will also be tested. You can already see those results in the HP dm1z review:
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/4187/hp-dm1z-taking-...
  • Dustin Sklavos - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    We already have low settings SC2 numbers for every low-powered notebook we test, SC2 is in our suite.
  • LeftSide - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    COD4 or COD5. My Dell studio 14 with nvidia 9400m can play cod4 at 1366x768 with low settings. World at War is too much too handle.
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    Hmmm... I've got so many FPS titles in there already. I suppose I can try COD4, which is a slightly newer take on Quake 4 engine IIRC.
  • UNHchabo - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    I have two suggestions:

    1) Killing Floor or Red Orchestra. As far as I know, you don't have any UT2.5 games on your list, and some lower-end graphics chips can still struggle on it.
    2) At least one racing game: maybe Need For Speed: Undercover, or Trackmania Nations.
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    I figure if Unreal Tournament 3 can run okay, anything on the UT2.5 engine should be okay as well.

    The racing genre is pretty unrepresented, true. I suppose one of the NFS games will do; I'm trying to remember what the last one I purchase is. NFS: Carbon I think. I remember playing Underground 1 or 2 and then Carbon, and felt like the series had lost me. What about NFS: World? Is that too demanding, or have they made it work well with slower systems?

    Also, I forgot that League of Legends is supposed to be in the above list as well. I suck at it, but I can at least play against the computer. :-)
  • cdeeter - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    How about one of the older Need for Speed games like Most Wanted or Underground? That way you would have a racing game in the mix.
  • HHCosmin - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    this is so stupid what this companies do. i think they deserve a little suing. they give you crap autonomy because they are too lazy to care about integration. for some time i thought that amd cpus were not that great as power usage goes. well... not anymore. sony proved that you can get good runtime with even a small battery with an amd platform. toshiba, asus, dell etc care crap about optimizing the platform (and think this is the case for intel to some degree). these machines are for mobile use so runtime is more important than raw power! do you hear me dear integrators?! they also make life harder for users by feeding crapware and opting out of programs that would assure good quality for drivers and would not cost them anything.... the platform is as good as the software is so use you brainz so good, uptodate drivers we need. do not really see much use for optical drives especially in small laptops and mostly in general. why is gbit lan missing? why all this obsession for gloss? i have some hard time what kind of person makes such decisions? do they know anything about IT in general? if they do it really does not show. i believe these companies really deserve some protests. my protest is simple... right now i believe has some dumb people around that make dumb selections of hardware.
  • HHCosmin - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    fully agree with Dustin. why have a expensive blueray drive in a budget machine? why not bigger battery? why not gbit lan? why not bluetooth? there are some decisions that make this look like some people at toshiba are very confused. this laptop could have been a lot better and cheaper but some toshiba dorks screw around. this really pisses me off.
  • ArKritz - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    I'm looking forward to a very different Toshiba: The Portege R830. If they've managed to get the noise level down (from the R630), or at least stable, and they've kept the anti-glare, I NEED THAT LAPTOP.

    Please, please, please don't refrain from reviewing it even if Toshiba also makes bad laptops.
  • Hrel - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    1366x768 screen... done, right there. No need to read further, not interested.

    700 bucks with the inclusion of blu-ray? Please, keep your useless blu-ray drive give me a useable screen and drop that price down some. This isn't 700 dollar hardware, 500 tops given the performance and already outdated parts.
  • RamarC - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    i understand why 1366x768 came to be (16:9), but i don't understand why it's practically the only alternative. where did 1280x800 go? and1600x900 is next-to-impossible to find without spending $1K.
  • Althernai - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    Most of the arguments in favor of this laptop seem to boil down to "it's only $619," but that is actually not that cheap nowadays. For example, HP's new ProBook 4430s (also 14" form factor, but with Sandy Bridge, a matte display and Professional rather than Home Premium Windows) is only $579. I guess you could make the argument "it's only $619 and it comes with a Blue Ray drive," but the notebook is pretty lousy in most other ways so it's probably not worth it unless you really want Blue Ray.
  • alent1234 - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    some people live with their computers and watch all their movies on their computers.

    laptops are a niche market where you try to make products for everyone's lifestyle. if you're a non-gamer and want something to watch your blu-ray collection on the road this is a good deal

    it's not like the old days where you need a supercomputer to push HD video. a cell phone will do it these days
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    @RamarC: Keep in mind that the HP 4330S uses an i3-2310M (2.1GHz with no Turbo). Hyper-Threading will still put it ahead of the P660 in some performance benchmarks, but I'm not sure pure single-threaded performance will be one of them. Granted, the HD 3000 IGP is about twice as fast as the HD 4250 (at least when it all works properly, which is about 90% of the time), but while $579 isn't bad it's also not the greatest when you factor in everything else.

    Blu-ray combo drives for laptops are still over $100 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... 640GB 5400RPM vs. 320GB 7200RPM is also about $30 more for the Toshiba drive (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... compared to http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... So add $130 for comparison and you're talking about $710 versus $620. But you're right: the HP is probably still better for many simply because it will have better battery life, better build quality, and none of the glossy crap.
  • strikeback03 - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    Is there a version of the Toshiba available without the Blu-Ray drive but all else the same? Because I can't see that being a major selling point for a lot of the budget market, given the listed HP plus $30 to match hard drives vs this Toshiba I'd think the majority of people would be better off with the HP for the same money.
  • ImSpartacus - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    I'm not sure how to interpret this comment. Is it a sentence? I'm definitely not an English major, so I don't know.

    "I've griped about this before but it bears repeating: glossy plastic photographs reasonably well and that's about it, and using it on the keyboard is a horrendous idea."

    What exactly is being said?
  • 7Enigma - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    What Dustin is saying is that glossy plastic looks good in photos (ie on a website, in a review article, on a sales circular), but in practice it's awful due to all the reflections and glare. And putting it on a keyboard where it's going to reflect is even worse since it is very close to the screen and much larger in area than the normal areas of complaint (wristpad for instance).
  • Shadowmaster625 - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    "I have complained about this in the past. Glossy black plastic only looks good to the people in the marketing department. Everyone else hates it. It definately should not be used on the keyboard."
  • Dustin Sklavos - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    Glossy plastic looks good in photos and that's about all it's good for; using glossy plastic for the keyboard is insane.
  • mmatis - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    I no longer touch any Toshiba products. Your mileage may vary.
  • Vincent - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    I see 10/100 ethernet offered on a surprising number of notebooks. Why cripple a machine like this? I wish reviewers would criticize manufacturers for not offering gigabit ethernet.
  • alent1234 - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    almost everyone uses wifi these days, and this is a way to cut some costs on a low margin product. most people won't care about no gigabit since no one has gigabit broadband and the whole home media server thing is a tiny niche
  • anactoraaron - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    yeah but let's face it, we're talking about a difference of about a dollar to Toshiba for the gigabit upgrade. And to say whole home media server or even media sharing is a niche in regards to a laptop with a blu-ray player seems a bit off base.
  • piroroadkill - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    No. If you want to use the laptops in a small business situation, imaging over gigabit is much, much faster.

    Believe me, consumer laptops DO get used in small business/education environments.

    Also, gigabit ethernet would cost almost nothing to add over 10/100. There's simply no reason not to have it.
  • piesquared - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    I recently bought an Acer 5552G with one an N660, and it's a terrific notebook. It has a 6470M but I never bought it for the gaming, even though it has no problems for what I use it for. Highly recommend the processors, and i'd wouldn't touch one of those flakey sand bridge things, or whatever they're called. It's a big risk buying one of those unstable and flawed parts.
  • Kibbles - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    I'm curious as to why glossy plastic is so adamantly deemed as bad, as if it's fact. I myself prefer the ultrafine matte that's almost like a paper texture, but that's a personal preference. I'm sure there's lots of people out there that like glossy plastics. I know my mom likes it. Could it be that the demographics that these low end laptops target predominantly prefer glossy plastics? Has any manufacturer ever given any statistical feedback on this?
  • LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    The amount of crap loaded on Toshiba laptops disguised as useful software makes me avoid them. Hey, we have a separate widget for managing absolutely everything, and each one runs in a separate process that takes up additional RAM, and each one is a separate executable that takes up disk space too! Isn't that NEAT?

    Toshiba, a bit of advice: Look at apps like Dell ControlPoint, or even a few of Lenovo's (not as cohesive, but still better thought-out), and realize what a great service you could do your users by bundling nearly a dozen system utilities into a single, unified app. That way, the average user doesn't have to send a system to me to figure out what is useful, what is not, and why all of the stock software is sucking half a gig of RAM (on top of what the OS takes) out of the box, and thrashing the disk. Actually, you're also less likely to have a user say "I'll never buy a Toshiba again, they're ungodly slow."
  • KiwiTT - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    After nearly 8 years since that model was released, I would have thought we would have had double or even triple the resolution in a 14" form-factor.

    And it is not just Toshiba, it is nearly all the manufacturers. And if you want comparable resolution to the T41, you have to pay almost double. While you may say that the new notebooks have better brighter Screens, CPUs, Graphic Cards, Battery life, etc., it seems as if screen resolution has been stuck in neutral. This is the main portal to all that is available in the notebook, so it should be the best it can be.

    I think major review sites like this one and others should actually start bemoaning this lack of increase in resolution for more mainstream notebooks. Even the new ipad2 was rumored initially to have a better resolution, but no, this was false again.
  • kmmatney - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    Agreed. I have 4-year old 1930 x 1200 Dell, and had a look at a possible replacement. I couldn't find anything at Dell with more than 1080 pixels, and even that was hard to find and cost a lot. I have to give Apple credit for still using 1920 x 1200 resolution in their laptops. 1366 x 766 is total crap - especially with the extra vertical bloat in Windows 7.
  • KiwiTT - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    and on the 768 height, once you add the toolbars etc. You may only have half the screen left.

    Don't manufacturers do real user usability testing? If they did, they'd soon come to light that 768 is abysmally small.
  • bhima - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link

    Your colorful language throughout the article made it a blast to read. Kudos Dustin!
  • Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    Thanks, much appreciated. :)
  • helboy - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    "It seems like manufacturers almost deliberately cripple AMD-based notebooks."

    Had been my doubt also for the past one year or so!! Almost all the notebooks that carry the "not enough battery life" label after reviews,the battery provided will be of inferior capacity.AND the reviewers mostly ignore this fact when highlighting poor backup.I wonder whether winning the anti-trust case is helping AMD much in the marketing war.
  • cdeeter - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    +1 Yeah what's the deal with giving AMD systems smaller batteries? They are using the same chassis so use the same battery!
  • silverblue - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    I can just imagine Intel realising they can't use one method to push AMD out of the market and then deciding to use another, albeit more subtle method. :P After all, battery life is king for a lot of people, so you need to prove those claims of long running times...

    And anyway, on an unrelated note, isn't it about time AMD got a stupid jingle for people to associate their products with? Everyone knows the Intel jingle.
  • jackylman - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    I picked up my new baby at a liquidation sale for the same price. It has the same CPU/GPU combo, but a 15.6" screen, webcam, gigabit LAN. On the downside, the hard disk is smaller (500GB) and no Blu-ray, but I'd rather have a bigger screen and a webcam.
  • fumigator - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link

    Despite all the criticism, I like this laptop. Thanks for the great review.
    Only thing I would like to say is that I miss somehow the lack of nvidia chipsets on laptops.

    I've owned an MSI VR630 that came with a geforce 9100 IGP and Turion X2 RM70 and I miss it all day. It was simply superb.

    Later on the ATI 3200s and 4200s IGP started to pop up like maries and somewhat the 9100 started to look old. But even those MSI that came with Nforce 8200 and intel Core solutions were far better than any HD4500 based notebook. Lets say, MSI CR400, CR500, CR600 all came with Nforce 8200 and Intel something (Celeron dual core / Pentium dual core / Core 2 Duo etc, depending on submodel) Now they are all discontinued and nobody did serious reviews on them.

    Moreover, i own an AM2+ motherboard with the Nforce chipset 8200 IGP as well, and I can't complain.
  • swaaye - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link

    My mom wanted a notebook with a Bluray drive because she travels a lot for work and lives in a hotel for days at a time. So it's her mobile media center. I found a $600 Sony with a 2.0 GHz Core 2, 4GB and GMA 4500 something like 18 months ago.

    This Toshiba seems like the latest edition of that kind of thing. For what these are used for the performance might not even be tangibly different.
  • Shanks22 - Monday, April 11, 2011 - link

    What's with Toshiba opting out of the ATI drivers? Does this mean the buyer can't just go to ATI's website and download the drivers from there?

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