Toshiba Satellite A105-S171

NWAnews.com has an article up that is a quick review of the Toshiba Satellite A105-S171, and the reviewer seemed to enjoy it, though found a few limitations with the machine that many casual users will notice quickly.

There was one minor weakness: the speakers Their loudest sound wasn’t very loud, and the quality was less than stellar at higher volumes, which surprised me since Toshiba uses Harmon Kardon, a high-quality company. It seems a shame for a computer to look so good and sound so blah.

I also had a problem with the video memory. Rather than dedicated memory chips, the computer shares its video memory with the system memory. In other words, the system may have 512 MB, but only 448 MB was being used because 64 MB was being set aside for video memory. When massive video and taxing processor tasks combine, every thing slows down as a result.

That brings me to the major weakness: that Celeron processor. I’ll be honest, I’ve never been a fan of Celeron processors, and this computer reinforced my prejudice. Shutdown start up, game play and some high-processing programs were just S-L-O-W.

I have to agree that the Celeron processor is not great, and not having dedicated video memory is also bad, and that is why I posted the review here, as anyone looking to have a laptop that is future proof, might want to avoid these two things. I know they are found in most low cost machines, but they really will limit your ability to use the machine later on, as your needs expand or change.

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