My business laptop (the one I use in the office) has been the HP tx-1110us. It was small and fully-featured, a little monster back when it was purchased second hand (I think it was 2008): 2GB or RAM, AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Core Mobile Technology @ 1.6Ghz, 12.1″ WXGA High-Definition 1280×800 and 120GB hard disk. Unfortunately it also featured the problematic Nvidia GeForce Go 6150, which eventually caused the laptop to overheat and collapse. A colleague of mine managed to fix the laptop once (what the local official service failed to do), recovering it from what we though a burned motherboard; it lasted for two years of hard daily work before it collapsed again – and this time I could not recover it…
Since I realized that I was mostly working with documents, spreadsheets and web pages, and in addition I always left my business laptop at the office, I decided to buy on 17-inch model. I didn’t care about dimensions and weight (I have plenty of room on my desk) so I went searching for the replacement immediately starting from the budget models. I checked 4-5 of them but I ended up with the Toshiba Satellite C670-1C1. It was cheap (bought it online from a local store: e-experts.gr, powerful and looked reliable; in addition, it was covered by an amazing free option for extended guarantee from Toshiba that covers accidents, drops, theft etc.
The laptop is blazing fast for office use, sporting an Intel® Pentium B960 (2.2GHz) and 4GB of RAM, 500GB of storage and a really vibrant 17.3” LED HD+ Backlit Truebrite 1600×900. I have been working with this laptop for about a month now and I am really pleased with it. The screen is really comfortable for the eyes and really bright and the laptop does not show any sign of delay etc. However, I have noticed some minor glitches that I have to admit are rather annoying:
1. There are only two USB ports, none of them 3.0. This is annoying because since I always have a USB mouse and my external HD plugged in, I have no spare port for e.g. charging a USB device or connecting an additional device, if needed. When it comes to that, I prefer to unplug my mouse and use the touchpad instead, but this is not comfortable. Since there is so much space in the design of a 17-inch laptop, I think that it would be great if they could add an additional USB port. Let alone the fact that even though my HD is USB 3.0, it has to cope up with the limitations of USB 2.0
2. All ports (USB, ethernet, audio, power) are located in the on the left side of the laptop, while there is not a single port e.g. at the back, close to the battery, where all cables and devices would not interfere with hands! In this area I think that my (smaller) previous laptop had a much better design.
3. Battery will not last more than 2 hours when unplugged, with Wifi turned on: Even though this is my business laptop, I have to carry it around in the office in some cases (e.g. in the meeting room) and there is not always the option of a power plug (especially in the crowded meeting room), so one has to be careful with the power management when away from a power outlet.
4. There is no HDMI port / only the standard VGA port. Despite the fact that I do not currently have any HDMI monitor/screen to connect my laptop to, this port may be handy in the near future.
To sum up, I believe that these minor issues spoil the very good impression I get from this laptop. If I could only fix one of them, it would surely be the USB ports as I need more and having a USB-hub n my desk as well is not the optimal solution. However, since the price for the laptop was rather low and the rest of the specs were pretty nice, I will have to bear with that for the next years…
More to come in the future.