My Toshiba T135D Came in the Mail Today
Written 2010-01-20
Tags:Intel GMA Intel Atom Hewlett-Packard
After rethinking the requirements of a laptop. I've come up with the following:
- Real video card (shared memory is fine, just no Intel GMA )
- CPU Power equivalent to Atom 330 (Dual Core 1.6 Ghz Included )
- CPU Virtualization Support (Turion Neo has it, Atom 330 doesn't)
- CPU 64 bit processing (Turion Neo has it, Atom N280 doesn't)
- Built In SD Slot or SSD Drive ( SD Slot)
- Hardline Gigabit-Ethernet or N Wifi ( Both )
First impressions:
- Large deadzone between left and right click. The mouse is a single bar, like a see-saw, with microswitches on each side.
- Solitaire is far cooler than Windows XP and previous editions.
- Internet Explorer comes only with Google Toolbar, which is far better than HP's version.
- The screen is bright, better resolution than my old 13.3 inch Macbook.
- Smaller and lighter than the Mcbook, but bigger than the HP 311.
- The 'Toshiba HDD Protection' system often pops up while the machine is sitting still informing me that a vibration was detected and that the hard drive head was parked to protect it.
- Windows UAC is pretty annoying.
- There's a PrintScreen key!
- Paint has been reworked.
- No weird USB Whitelist junk like HP uses either.
- There's a built-in watt meter application. This should just be a simple power controller query, but when combined with a graph, it is pretty neat. The machine idles around 3-4 watts.
- I never thought I would buy a new AMD Processor, ever since Intel's Core 2 Duo stompfest, but on this small market, low speed high capability CPUs, AMD really has something. Combined with the fact that Intel has attached a chipset directly to the CPU on their newer units, I just can't see usable 3D graphics with the new Intel Atoms. The whole thing's pretty slick.
On a side note, I managed to never use Windows Vista, except for one time I used it to launch Firefox.