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Bought this through Amazon last summer and the hard drive malfunctioned in less than 10 month. I had a Toshiba laptop abut 15 years ago and that one lasted forever. I will NOT recommend Toshiba any more.
I used it during two years of college and it went through major abuse but it held in there playing games, itunes, and all sorts of downloads. Heat is the enemy of all electrical components. After this it works like a charm. I'm no apple wiz but after blaming my Toshiba for not detecting my ipod I began to suspect my firewire and bought a new one from Apple and the itunes loaded in a sec.One Note:For the laptop and technically challenged - Anti-Virus software and IE8 bog down your system.
I bought it on sale from Best Buy for 400 dollars and sold it yesterday for 300 dollars on craigslist because people like the duo core that works well and runs itunes, bf2, bf1942, MS Word and Autocad like a charm. Remove it and back up your sensitive data on an external hard drive and run Vista on minimal settings and it will run super fast.Also: it over heats if you keep it on a blanket or a table and run it for hrs. I purchased an additional 1 GB of RAM and had it installed. and hrs. The major obstacle you will have is getting Vista to work properly. It came with a duo core processor and 1 gb of Ram.
This computer is great for the price. To get it going you have to reduce Vista to minimal settings and take off all the extra malware that it comes with. And if you are having problems with your ipod you need to update itunes or replace the firewire cable. like I did and then automatically shuts off so invest in a cooling fan. I bought this computer in January 2008 and sold it yesterday-June 2009. Let me tell you that I use and abuse computers and this one held out.
Trust me, often it is just the apple firewire cable.
the only upgrade I made is with the ram. The sound on this baby is the top, it has good internet reception both wired or wireless.
Highly recommend it. It doesn't have camera nor microphone on it.
Very good image quality, good hand rest but I only give it 4 stars it lacks usb ;port and the ROM drive is not superior. So I am very satisfied with this Toshiba product.
I bought this laptop from somewhere else, and I've been using it for 14 months non stop for video application, email, word processing and so on so far so good for it doesn't crash once. It's now running on 1.5 GB ram.
Besides that the Toshiba satellite a205-s5804 is a reliable laptop.
It's quick and reliable. This laptop is a great value for basic computer needs. It's also easy (and pretty cheap) to upgrade if you just buy the RAM separately.
If you do purchase one, the first thing you should do is stick another GB of RAM in it. Not a novice problem to solve. I didn't have Vista on it long enough verify whether it's an issue there as well, but the laptop consumes power even when off. I currently have Ubuntu 8.04 installed, and ran into 2 issues that anyone who intends to run a Linux laptop should be aware of.First, the wifi card is an internal USB RTL8187b. The only way to get the wireless to work is to use a Windows driver wrapper (didn't work on my distro), or compile your own patched driver.
This also means that you can't just replace the wifi card with a supported chipset to fix the problem. Also, the wifi switch on the case is apparently software driven and doesn't function in linux (it's always on). Let the machine sit for a couple days and the battery is dead without fail. Not just in sleep mode, even when completely powered down. I know there was a BIOS issue with the A105 that did this, but the A205s appear to be notorious for bricking during a BIOS flash. This is unsupported in linux by Realtek, and the 8187 driver DOES NOT work with this card. If you're looking for a primary system though, I'd look someplace else.
The 1GB that it comes with really doesn't cut it, especially if you're going to run Vista on it. It's a proprietary design and is apparently specific to this laptop. Toshiba apparently cut a bunch of corners to hit their price point on this one, so this is likely the last Toshiba I'll buy. I'm not going to try it.All in all, you get what you pay for. I've had this laptop for around 18 months, and it is sufficient for what I use it for. Yes, that's right -- internal USB. Second, the power management is flaky.
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