Toshiba Satellite Pro A60 Review

Good Points
Sturdy design Nice Blue colour Get a lot for your money

Bad Points
Overheating/crashing problems experienced Memory upgrade was necessary Required a lot of tweaking to get 'right'

General Comments
The Toshiba Satellite Pro A60 laptop is ideal for entry level home users, and possibly students who have some time on their hands to sort stuff out. I wouldn't say it was suitable for the lower end of the business market, as Toshiba seem to be targeting with this product. I could be wrong however, maybe I was just unlucky!



I have had mine for 8 months now, after previous satellite old faithful, which I had owned for about 7 years, gave up the ghost in the middle of a project, and I needed a cheap laptop quickly. I was impressed by the blue design which veers away from the boring black/grey you're used to seeing on the budget end notebooks.



For the budget it was a toss up between this or a Dell, and in the end I decided to go for the Tosh which wasn't the bottom end of the scale like the Dell was for the same money.



Due to the ATI graphics being on the motherboard, you don't really get 256MB Ram. This slowed things down a lot. It's certainly not a gaming notebook, but that's to be expected. Things had a habit of freezing up if there were 2 or 3 apps open simultaneously.



I purchased a 1GB Ram from Crucial, and this improved things considerably. 512MB are about half the price, but I thought what the hell, I need it!



I had a few problems with the laptop overheating and freezing/crashing. The fan was on full blast constantly, like working at Heathrow. At one point I was afraid the plastic was going to melt it got so hot! As well as the ram upgrade, I found the following helpful, so if you're having problems a bit of advice...



1. Found most of the tosh apps quite useless, and they just eat memory up. Removing all these helped a great deal. Get a tweak UI type program to help with this.



2. If possible, do a 'clean' install of your operating system to get rid of all the 'rubbish' software that's preloaded. All the drivers are on the website for re-installing the graphics and sound cards.



3. IMPORTANT - Upgrade your BIOS from the Toshiba site. They are reporting that a version of 1.7 or older will cause the overheating. However, I had 1.7 and found upgrading to 1.9 really helped to overcome the problem.



4. If the above fails, invest in some more memory, your Tosh will thank you for it.



I was a bit disappointed as there was no XP CD, just a 'recovery disk', but I guess this is the way they all operate these days.



Overall, I probably wouldn't go for this model again, although for the money it's not a bad little laptop. I would like to think though, that these problems have been sorted with later orders shipped out to customers. Get this if you want a cheap notebook that you don't mind getting bashed about a bit, and if you're prepared to spend some time tweaking it to your requirements.