I bought this laptop for my father from Amazon and brought it to Turkey, where i live. For a week or so it was working fine, then it started to act weird. The documents got lost, random restarts and blue screen of death started to appear. I re-installed windows 7 but it gave a blue screen even in the middle of the setup. Then I knew it was a hardware problem. Because I am in Turkey I couldn't brought it to Toshiba support, so I decided to run some tests on memory with MemTest86 and voila! The ram was faulty, it was a single piece of 4gb Hynix ram and after I replaced it with a decent 4gb Kingston ram the laptop started to run flawless (Toshiba it is 30$ for gods sake!). The performance of the unit is very good indeed but a hardware problem in a new laptop like this is very very disappointing. My father was so frustrated that he kept saying he would never buy another Toshiba laptop again!
Shame on you Toshiba for using cheap products and not testing them properly...
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Over the past 18 years I've had a total of 10 different notebooks including 2x Macs, 2x Sony Vaios and several Toshibas (not to mention a brief and disastrous flirtation with Dell). Macs are currently excluded from my shortlist due to lack of compatibility with Sage Line 50 accounts software, so to replace my 2-year old TECRA 110 I looked at the current crop of Toshiba notebooks.
Despite being a fast and beefy computer handling loads of software and ideal for office work, the TECRA has two drawbacks: heavy weight and poor battery life away from the mains. It's so big it often doesn't fit the rectangular plastic tray container at airport security, but has to sit lopsided half-in, half-out. So the portability issue was a major consideration when choosing a replacement. The TECRA's battery life was barely 90 minutes away from the mains, which is hardly enough to do any productive work whilst travelling before having to find a mains socket.
The availability of the recent 2nd generation Intel core processor has finally made possible notebooks with the Goldilocks combination of fast data processing (even with high-demand programs) combined with long battery life and relatively lightweight construction. I've had my Portege R830 with its 13.3-inch screen for two months now and it delivers fast and trouble-free computing together with the convenience of lightweight portability and no exaggeration, I've experienced this on two occasions now 7-hour battery life of continuous working away from the mains. Amazing.
This R830 has a smart black & chrome design, plain and discrete rather than flashy. It has a real CPU rather than a ULV chip, a 500GB hard drive, integral mike and camera, useful speakers with good volume and tone as well as connecting ports for externals, and plenty of port options:
* standard USB on both sides (more convenient than having ports on only one side)
* SDXC card slot
* SATA port
* HDMI port
* DVD drive
* a connector for the chunky 5-point x 3-row plug on the end of your printer cable, whatever the technical name for that plug design is
There's also a fingerprint reader for user-security which I can never get to work properly so don't use; it invariably refuses to recognise two or more prints of the same finger, as the same finger.
It boots in about 30 seconds, the fastest I've ever experienced with a laptop. The screen colour res is beautiful, sharp and clear and it does everything instantaneously.
The minus points form a very short list. The fan can be a bit noisy (but hardly a major problem); and the keyboard is less attractively designed than the previous TECRA with gaps between the keys, but works fine even for someone with fairly chunky fingers.
Overall this is very good value for a mid-range machine: you get a lot of processing power and memory combined with genuine lightweight, carry-in-your-hand portability and long battery life.
I have no experience of Toshiba's warranty service with this R830 as it has, thus far, no faults. I did return the previous TECRA once for a screen fault and on that occasion they sent someone to collect it and returned it, repaired, after two days: very efficient and all FOC.
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This is hands down, the best computer I have ever used. It is super light, boots in seconds, opens programs instantly, handles web video perfectly, and it processes large files seamlessly. On top of all that, it is beautiful. It also has a great battery life. I haven't tested it for time, but I never worry about it. The laptop also runs very quiet and cool. Impressive. One reviewer on a similar model asked what the noise they heard inside was. Since it has a solid state hard drive, it has no moving hard drive parts. What you can occasionally hear is a variable speed fan that ramps up in speed if the processor is working hard. When the fan is running at high speed, it is still quieter than the hard drive of another computer I have on the other side of the room.
My only complaint is that the space bar is squeaky. I am going to call Toshiba about it to see what can be done. It is a minor inconvenience for the most amazing machine I have ever worked with.
Bottom line, get the i7 processor and the solid state hard drive (SSD), you will be impressed.
Honest reviews on Toshiba Portege PT321U-0FW04Q 13.3' LED Notebook - Black
I purchased two of these laptops in January 2012. One for my husband and one for me. In March (3 months later), my husband's laptop screen went black. He couldnt see a thing. So Toshiba sent us a kit to ship the laptop back to them to be repaired. He got it back "fixed". But was never told what was wrong with it. The same thing happened again a few months later, but then mysteriously corrected itself withing a couple of days. Then in August 2012 the incident happened again but did not correct itself. So we called customer service. They told us they could "look at the codes" on his laptop and they said it was a virus. They told us we had to buy a 3 year service plan before they would help us. We didn't feel like we had any choice so we said okay and purchased it even though it was only 8 months old and the plan was expensive. We were on the phone for several hours with the technician and never got the problem resolved. So we asked for a refund and they would not give it to us. They were adamant and I was very upset. So after several months of the laptop collecting dust on a shelf, my husband took the laptop to a local repair shop. It turned out the problem was a loose wire. It probably occurred during the manufacturing process and the original repair never fixed the problem. The local repairman also pointed out where the Toshiba repair tech cracked the plastic around the screen and damaged the laptop. The local repairman charged us $60 to repair the loose wire. He said that Toshiba farms out repairs to small shops. Some shops are better than others. My laptop has worked fine. But because of that experience I won't purchase another Toshiba product.
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The laptop I received was working on a 32 bit system, although the seller claimed to be 64-bit.. I called to on-line service (very good Toshiba service) and we tried a few times to reset the computer to 64-bit.. after a while the system crashed and Toshiba recommended me to return it. So I did. I'm using now a 64-Bit Toshiba Portege 835 P92.. it doesn't have SSDrive or i7 but has a i5 2450M, 2.5 ghz and a 600Gb HD.. working perfectly for 6 months now.
I can't rated higher due to my bad luck.. I still would like to buy one with SSD and a better processor, next year.
