Sunday 19 June 2011

Toshiba R830

The R830 is a cheap, small, light and reasonably powerful notebook.

It cost £710 from Micro Amvika on Tottenham Crt Rd.

The first impressions are good, although the cost cutting does show.

Specification
  • Intel® Core™ i5-2410M Processor 2.30GHz / 2.90GHz Turbo
  • Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit
  • 6GB 1333MHz DDR3 RAM (Max 8GB)
  • 640GB 5.400rpm Hard Disk Drive
  • 13.3" 1366 x 768 Toshiba TruBrite® HD TFT High Brightness Display
  • Intel® HD Graphics 3000
  • 1x USB 3.0, 2x USB 2.0 (1xsleep on charge), 1xeSata
  • 1.5kg
  • VGA and HDMI
  • RJ45 Ethernet.
  • Wi-Fi® 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN
  • Bluetooth® 3.0 + HS
Screen
Very evenly lit, seems bright with good contrast. No obvious defects.
The resolution, however, is a problem.  The horizontal resolution of 768 makes it difficult to browse web pages or edit documents.  Guess what I spend 90% of my time doing?  Its probably OK for watching films, something I never do on a notebook as I have a TV. The 16:9 ratio is not suitable for business use - its only useful for games and films.  This notebook is not for gaming.  The best ratio is 4:3, like my old Dell D600 which 7 years later is still going strong and had by far the most optional screen resolution and ratio.

When you connect the HDMI to a HD TV, it sends sound also.  However, the picture comes out so over saturated that it is unwatchable.  On the TV, you have to take the saturation down to 20%, and it still looks bad compared with my Macbook pro, for example.  Looking at the internal screen, the Tosh has also supersaturated the colours, but the screen is not as bright so you don't notice it as much.  Ill have to buy a colour calibration tool.

Crapware
I have previously owned many Dells and a Macbook Pro.  Neither have much crapware.  I was pretty shocked by the sheer quantity of useless rubbish which pervades this machine at every level. Your Task Bar and desktop are half full with rubbish, leaving hardly any space for your own tasks.  It has things like "Toshiba  Bulletin board", WildTangent games, "Toshiba Music Place", ebay and  bbc iplayer desktop.  And of course the usual Office and Anti-Virus trial rubbish which has to be deleted from all new computers.
To make it even worse, every one of these is not properly installed - when you click on them a popup dialogue appears saying "Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to your computer" as if they are some untrusted malware downloaded from the web.   Even things which may be useful like the "Toshiba user guide" say this.  Why would I let a user guide modify my computer?   The only way to avoid viruses is to not let anything modify your computer unless you have installed it yourself from a trusted source.
To make matters worse, the Toshiba crapware pervades every application.  It is not possible to play a simple flash game or flash movie, for example.  A large icon appears when you put the mouse into the flash window, obscuring the window, which says "By clicking on this button, it's possible to forward the movie playback to a Digigal Media Rendering deviced connected to your network, e.g. a Toshiba TV".  There is no way to get rid of it.  If you click on it, it says it will modify your firewall, and gives on only one option: "OK".  Again, there is no way I'm going to let unwanted crapware modify my machine or open up ports in my firewall.  Its not possible to play bejeweled  on this machine, as you cant access the top right hand corner jewels.  The solution this this particular nastyness, is in IE, to hit *->Manage Add-ons->Toshiba Media Controller Plug-in" and disable it.  I haven't found a way of permanently deleting this annoying junk yet, its "remove" button is greyed out.  You have to do this for every user.

Hard Drive
The HD is user-replaceable.  Mine had a 2.5" x 9.5mm high Hitachi  Travelstar™ 5K750 640GB at 5400 RPM (part number HTS547564A9E38)

Steps to remove the drive:
  1. Shutdown and disconnect the power cord
  2. Remove the memory cover (which is underneath the laptop in the centre) by removing its two screws.
  3. Remove the two screws from the HD cover (one of which was under the memory cover).
  4. Pull gently on the clear plastic tag on the bottom of the drive to remove

Windows
This comes with windows home premium.  Unfortunately, this is the useless one which is missing the backup features which home owners need just as much as premium users, e.g. I cant backup to my NAS backup drive.  I am a business user who wants to do things like connect to domains and ideally run XP mode.  So this version is sub-standard.  I might purchase a premium or ultimate license to be able to do the full backups and other essential operations.  Ill have to investigate other options such as to purchase a 3rd party backup solution, and find another way of connecting to work domains.

Keyboard
This is the main area where Toshiba has cut corners.  They keyboard is the worst I have ever used.  Having said that, you can type on it and it works, so it is adequate.   My main gripes, apart from the poor feel and feedback, are that my fingers hurt after typing due to the short travel and hard stop.  On the plus side, the space bar works 100%, the enter key is double height, and the layout is similar to Dells which is a bonus.
It is not back lit which is a big shame.
There are no HW buttons for the two most important functions: volume control and to switch WIFI on/off if you want to conserve battery.  Volume controls are difficult to find, and difficult to use.  You have to press FN-ALT-3 & FN-ALT-4 to put the volume down and up.  When you do this, there is no visual feedback, so you have no idea if its working unless you first play the sound, and alter whilst playing, which is less than ideal.  To switch off the wifi is harder still, you have to hit FN-F8 a random number of times to cycle through cryptic options and you have no idea if you have switched it on or off.
Instead of two usefull buttons (volume and wifi), Toshiba have given use two uselss buttons.  One switches the screen output to external monitor (I change volumen MUCH more than change monitor output), and an eco mode.  The eco mode is useless because it makes the screen so dim its not actually usable, even in a dim room, and it doest actually give you any noticeable increase in battery life.

Trackpad
The pad itself is adequate.   Unfortunately it does not have two finger gestures out of the box.  It doesn't seem to move the mouse when I type, which is good.  Its adequate size.  The buttons, however, are difficult to hit as they are smooth with the laptop case - you cant feel where they are so end up stabbing the wrong place.
To enable two finger scrolling you need to go to "pointing device properties" (e.g. by right licking on synaptics pad icon in tray), then "Device Settings" tab, then hit "Settings" button, then open the "Scrolling" tree, then disable "one finger scrolling", then "enable virtiacal" and horizontal scrolling under "two finger scrolling".  Took me a while to find this - it should be in the main mouse properties dialogue.

Ports
USB 3.0 is an essential and welcome addition, and Toshiba should be applauded for including it.  As a bonus, is also an eSATA port.  There are 3 usb ports in total, which is adequate.
VGA is a waste of space - its a 27 year old standard and I dont think I have seen a VGA monitor for 10 years.  An RS232 serial port would be more use to me than VGA - I still occasionally come across servers which need it.
According to the documentation, the HDMI port only goes up to 1080p, a feeble resolution for an external monitor.  The Intel HD3000 easily supports higher resolutions, such as 2560x1600 but Tosh have crippled the output.  So I cant run my 30" or even my old 23" monitor off it, as it cant handle the resolution.  Display port would have solved this.  Why cant manufactures standardise on this?

Processor
It has an i5-2410M at 2.3 Ghz which scores 4.7 in the windows experience index, what ever that is.  Firfox 4 still pauses and stutters the machine when opening new pages, but in general it seems fast enough.  When I have loaded lightroom, Photoshop, Eclipse, Oracle etc I'll let you know how it copes.

Conclusion
For the bargain price, the minor hardware foibles can be forgiven and I can definitely recommend this laptop.  It is very light, fast and cheap.  Its probably not as reliable or robust as say a Lenovo X220, but if it breaks, you can buy a new one and it would still cost less.  Toshiba have obviously wasted a lot of money developing and installing Crapware, money that you are having to pay in the purchase cost and in working out how to install and disable it.

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