Toshiba 4600 notebook

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Fatwah on Western Digital
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I happen to have in my possession at the moment, 10 P3 1GHz/256MB/20GB Toshiba 4600 notebooks. Some of them have Win2000 Pro or WinXP Pro loaded on them, but they're all destined to have Win98SE. I'm only going to have them for a few days.

Anyone interested in impressions of the hardware, or have any interesting ideas for things I could *DO* with 10 1GHz notebooks?
 

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Fatwah on Western Digital
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Haven't we had this discussion before?

Just as a general note... I can't believe how slow these things are. No faster than my IBM 540 (Celeron 466). The ones running 2000/XP are even worse.

Gah. It's got to be the slow hard disk. I haven't opened one up to check what brand it is. I'll be doing that shortly.
 

HellDiver

Learning Storage Performance
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Are they 133MHz or 100MHz? It's been a while since desktop P3s went 133, dunno about laptops though... Also, are the P3s Tualies or the original breed (i.e. CopperMine counterparts)?
 

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Fatwah on Western Digital
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The RAM is PC 133. I suppose the CPU is, too, but none of the packaging indicates one way or the other.
 

HellDiver

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There's got to be some indication of FSB somewhere there... In "System Information", perhaps? Then again, if it's PC133 (actually running at 133MHz) - chances are it's a 133MHz FSB too, I doubt they'd bother to go ansynchronous...
 

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Fatwah on Western Digital
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Odd. The DIMMs on the couple I've opened up are Micron PC-133 modules (more odd, I thought Toshiba made its own RAM). The hard disk is also Toshiba-branded. My "stopwatch" test put the transfer rate on the formatted hard disk (between 1200 and 1400MB in on the disk) at 17.1MB/sec, which seems pretty dismal.

Battery life isn't bad. Amy sat around playing Hearts on one of them all afternoon. She puts battery life from full-charge at about two hours, ten minutes. It's rated for 2.5 hours.

These things get really, really hot in the rear, left corner. It's very quiet, though.

The casing feels cheap. Not sturdy at all, and one of the laptops had keys knocked off the keyboard when I opened it. They're easy to put back on, but I also knocked off a couple all on my own while using the joy-nipple. These laptops are going to be used by (undergrad) college students. Somehow the fact that keys come off so easily isn't comforting.

There are four "mouse buttons". I have no idea what two of them do.

Toshiba's provided documentation is very skimpy. Most of it is generic for several Toshiba laptop models. Vlad's PDF file is more info than came with the systems.

Display. It's big, but there's light leakage around the bottom edge. A couple of them are display slightly uneven brightness across the plane of the display (i.e. one side is noticeably brighter than the other). DVDs look pretty good until there's a lot of action... then I'm not sure if the problem is the decoding software or the display, but there's definite ghosting.

These laptops came with 802.11b PCMCIA adaptors, but I don't have a way to test that right now, nor did I bother with the CD-RW portion of the drive - I've been asked to remove CD-Creator, anyway.

The laptop is fairly bulky. These particular machines aren't going to be carried around, but they're physically large and heavy.
 
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