Wednesday, March 3, 2010

My New Toshiba E-105 - Easy Come, Easy Go!

Hello Readers!

Sorry for not updating this blog much lately.  I've been buried with work at the office and dreary administrative tasks that are time traps.  I am going to make a special effort to update this blog more regularly even if the posts are brief.  Here's a brief up

In late July, I purchased a new "Blue Label" Toshiba laptop (E-105-S1602) sold exclusively at Best Buy to replace an aging Acer (5000 series).  The Acer had proved to be a reliable machine for the past four years, but it was starting to be plagued with random blue screen of death problems.   The Blue Label series at Best Buy features laptops with the fancy features that customers want most, over and above the standard offerings. 

 

In this case, the E-105 I purchased featured a relatively fast Core 2 Duo P7350 processor, a fingerprint scanner for secure logons, roomy 500 GB hard drive, 4 MB RAM, webcam, FM radio, 14.1 inch display with 1280x800 resolution, HDMI port, 3 USB ports, eSATA/USB port, multi-format memory card reader, built in Wi-Fi, Ethernet, bluetooth and a double layer DVD burner with Labelflash.  Plus it had an extended battery life of nearly five hours (!), a two year warranty, lighted keyboard and Norton Antivirus with a 18 month subscription.  All this computer power was packaged into a stylish, compact case that was well suited for traveling at just a hair over five pounds.  The price was about $800, which was very reasonable at the time.  The E-105-S1602 shipped with Vista, but was eligible for a free Windows 7 upgrade.  Until now, all my computers ran Windows XP and I was hoping to avoid the Vista debacle entirely.

This tangent alone could easily fill many blog posts, but trying to use Microsoft Vista for the first time proved to be quite frustrating.  It was still Windows so I was not totally lost, but at the same time, so many things were different I had to spend a substantial amount of time just trying to accomplish tasks that formerly were easy to do in XP.  It was highly annoying the changes killed my productivity while adding little to my computing experience.  Software publishers should be very cautious when changing familiar interfaces.  Change for sake of change (or to sell a new version of software short on real improvements) is a cardinal sin. 

Also, the Toshiba shipped with the 64 bit version of Vista and I encountered quite a few programs in my regular arsenal that were incompatible.  I'm not talking about ancient programs from the DOS days, I'm talking about programs that worked fine with XP.  One such program is Word Pro, part of IBM's Lotus SmartSuite.  I've used SmartSuite going all the way back to the mid 90's when I attended law school and nearly all my word processing documents are in this format.  IBM has pretty much stopped development on the software package, which was once a serious competitor to Microsoft Office.   Other programs were compatible, but had problems installing properly.  For example, EZ-Filing Bankruptcy software totally bombed during installation.  After calling technical support, I was told I needed to disable Vista's User Account Control (UAC), a feature that increases security, but also causes headaches for programmers and end computer users alike.  It took about a month before I finished adding all the different programs I needed for my office.

Unfortunately, in September, my office building was burglarized.  My office and about ten other executive suites were broken into.  The thugs made off mainly with computers, cash and any credit cards they could find.  My new Toshiba laptop described above was stolen during this incident.  All the struggle and time spent tweaking the machine was for nothing.  What can you do?  As they say, easy come, easy go.
I only got to work with that computer for a couple months, but that was long enough to gain some insights about it.  First, the E-105 was very fast!  It zipped through installations (when they worked) and all my software programs performed well.  You could especially see the blazing performance when compressing files or encoding MP3s.  I also really liked the form factor of the case (described by Toshiba as "airy") and super long battery life.  The computer is only 1.2 inches thick and quite light making it perfect to grab and go.  I never had a laptop that even approached how long the batteries would last on this machine.  Also, the fingerprint scanner was very cool. 

On the downside, the E-105 had absolutely atrocious sound quality.  The distortion was unbearable even at a moderate volume level.  Headphones and external speakers or a sound bar are an absolute necessarily with this series.  Also, the keyboard has touch buttons on right hand side for common functions such as "play" and volume control.  My hands had a tendency to inadvertently hit these controls at times during normal typing.  This was a considerable annoyance as it would often cause a media file to suddenly start playing or the sound to become very loud or soft.  Lastly, the 14.1" LCD screen had a beautiful display, but I found it a tad small in practice for my middle-age eyes.  In the future, unless I am buying a netbook, I think I will stick with 15" or higher displays only!

If you are interested in purchasing an E-105 laptop, click on the link below.  The model below is the E105-S1802, a slightly upgraded model available for about $800.


-- Michael