Almost perfect...
Written: Jan 20 '00
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Pros: Light, beautiful screen
Cons: Keyboard not as good as IBM
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| ajmayo's Full Review: Toshiba Portege 7020 |
Not a perfect machine, though its annoyances are not major. I would look at the IBM 570 also before making a final decision. However, I should mention that I got the Portege as an ex-demo machine at a very keen price - around USD1800, including CDROM drive, and if you can get one for that price, you'll forgive it any minor shortcomings.
This is my travelling laptop; I have a Thinkpad set up in the office. The Thinkpad keyboard is superior, mainly in the layout rather than feel, as the Portege keys have quite good travel and it feels nice to type on. The keyboard is much better than, say, the Sony Vaio, where the key travel is just not adequate. The main keyboard flaw is that there is an entire column of keys to the right of the return key, which puts the PgDn key immediately to the right of the return key, but after a little while you stop hitting that by mistake most of the time. I prefer to type on the Thinkpad in the office, though, but of course you could always buy an external keyboard.
If, like me, you hate those nasty touchpads, Toshiba, like IBM, use the trackpoint, which I really prefer. (In fact, I wouldn't have bought it otherwise). While it takes a little practice to master the trackpoint, it is precise and reliable, and being a strain gauge with no moving parts, it's unlikely to cause any problems on the road. Unfortunately, and this is a stupid design deficiency, you cannot plug a PS/2 mouse into the unit unless you connect the (surprisingly large) external port replicator - of course, if you run Win9x you could instead plug in a USB mouse because the USB port *is* inbuilt, but under NT4, this is not an option since NT has no USB driver. Still, that's not really Toshiba's fault.
The screen is superb, perfectly even illumination and no dead pixels at all. Power management makes my Thinkpad look prehistoric, with five settings, each fully customisable for screen brightness and cpu speed for each 25% of battery charge, this is immensely flexible and well designed. Charge is monitored to 1% resolution and is absolutely accurate, so you know pretty much to the minute how much runtime you have. Contrast this with the TP which has only a flashing low battery indicator and a 'fuel gauge' that shows full and then suddenly empty. Also the TP thinks the battery is flat long before it really is; no such problems with this machine. I run NT with no problems except that when suspending the machine with the network card installed I get a dialogue box asking me if I really want to suspend. This is annoying because you can't just suspend the machine by closing the lid - pressing Y to confirm after doing that might be a little difficult!. Instead you have to do it from the menu or press the power button.
The unit was supplied with an external Freecom CDROM which connects via a PCMCIA card. I am afraid I can't recommend that unit. It is very light and appears well-built but the driver software doesn't work well under NT. Often after a media change the drive becomes unusable, reporting 'invalid function' each time you try and access it, until you reboot. It has great trouble reading CD-R as well, and it gets into some kind of resource clash with the sound driver, as well as causing blue screens when you go into suspend. An email to Freecom has gone unanswered, so I would suggest you look at another brand or buy the docking station, probably the best bet, I think.
Battery life is acceptable at around 2 hrs 20 minutes if I set the screen brightness to 60% and processor at mid-speed. That is more than fast enough for most mobile work.
The fan is annoyingly audible, even in an office environment, if you set cooling to performance mode but in silent mode it is really quiet. Of course, the TP570 is liquid cooled, which seems a better approach entirely and likely to improve reliability.
Finally, the lack of a tilt stand at the rear is annoying. I like the Thinkpad legs which flip out to angle the keyboard up a little - I had to cut an old mousemat into pieces to make a tilt for the Portege.
Still, on balance I really like the Portege. It has halved my carry weight over the Thinkpad and it's a sexy-looking little thing with a superb screen and a pretty good keyboard. It runs NT very nicely indeed. If you can get one for a good price, I don't think you'd regret it. At full retail, though, I would look seriously at the Thinkpad 570. If nothing else, you can use the 570 as leverage if you feel like haggling with your local Toshiba dealer.
PS: If you want to run Linux on it, I believe this can be done. The internal modem is a WinModem and thus unusable under Linux but I believe that is the only big issue. I have heard that Toshiba have been reluctant to open up system internals to the Linux crowd, which might constrain things a bit, but realistically, if Linux continues its assault on the computer industry, Toshiba will just have to toe the line, so I wouldn't be discouraged by that. I don't know what Toshiba are like for warranty claims, by the way, would anyone like to comment?
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1800
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium II
Processor speed: 301-400
Screen Size: 13"
RAM: 96
Hard Drive (GB): 7-9
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Epinions.com ID:
ajmayo
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Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 3 members
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