This is a fantastic sub-500 laptop that features a CPU marked at 1.3 Ghz but rated to 1.95 Ghz, and a very nice graphics card for the money. The hard-drive is relatively small, but is sufficient for most office and school needs. The 4.5 GB DDR3 RAM is nice also, good for multitasking. the 15.6 inch screen is fantastic, and has great color depth and, being covered with glass, is easy to clean. The full sized keyboard is nice, though some buttons are in un-orthodox positions, but they are easy to get accustomed to. The island style keys help to avoid typos. The battery life with display turned down is approximately 6 hours with light use, with heavy use (playing medieval 2 total war with volume all the way up, graphics settings all on max, and brightness all the way up) yielded a battery life of about 4 hours, which is phenomenal. All that being said, the speakers are very sub-par, a trait I have noticed on several of my other Toshiba laptops, and it is recommended that you purchase external powered speakers. Another minus is that they volume controls and brightness are controlled through some Toshiba program that displays a dark gray bar over things you are working on, and fails to properly initiate sometimes, forcing you to reboot or disable the software (this seems to be one of those flashy things laptop makers include for the "wow" factor, similar to HP's quick launch garbage). It comes loaded with a bunch of useless and near-useless bloatware from the manufacturer, like "Toshiba book place" which launches by default, and Norton internet security is on there, which is an awful choice, so I just deleted those things and disabled them in start-up through msconfig. For those interested, it features a wireless card capable of packet injection, works great with Backtrack 5 live CD. It comes with Windows 7 64bit edition, though it works flawlessly with Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, and FreeBSD (haven't tried Fedora, sorry). No complaints so far, except for the speakers. Very professional product, great for students and business applications, though gamers will be disappointed, as this can not handle titles published within the past 3 years, but it will run older titles beautifully. I would recommend it, especially to parents looking to buy their kids a good laptop for college. Hope this review was helpful.
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