Toshiba Satellite u925t

My Acer laptop died (after only one year!), so I was in the market for a new laptop.  I decided to keep an eye out for a replacement for my wife's Toshiba netbook.  Her netbook had an unfortunate disagreement with the floor.  The device ran fine.....the screen was just cracked.  I was originally going to wait for Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals to come out, but Woot had a one day sale on a refurbished Toshiba Satellite u925t.  I did some googling and watched some Youtube videos and decided it would work for both of us, so I bought two.

I won't go into specs, since you can get that from any website/review.  Here are a few things to consider that the specs don't always get into.  The screen is on a unique track design that won't allow it to close like a standard clamshell.  Instead of closing it, you lay it all the way back.  Once it is all the way back, it slides over the keyboard.  This unique design means the keyboard is completely hidden when in tablet mode (which I like a lot) but also means the screen is always showing (which is bad when putting it in backpack).  The screen is Gorilla Glass, but you will still want to buy some sort of mini-laptop case before putting it into an actual laptop bag.

I don't benchmark my hardware, so I don't have any raw numbers, but the performance seemed fine.  I tend to run hardware a lot harder than most non-IT people, but I also run Linux so the performance is always better.  Subjectively, the performance seems fine for what I am doing.  My wife kept the Windows 8 install while I immediately installed Ubuntu.  In a future post I will dive into detail on how Ubuntu works on a Tablet PC.

What surprised me the most was how much both my wife and I leave the laptop in tablet mode.  The on screen keyboards for both operating systems work really well.  The only "every day" tasks that I use laptop mode for is programming and blogging.  Everything else that I do using the on screen keyboard.  Since my emails tend to be a lot shorter, I will use the on screen keyboard for email.  Most websites work perfectly fine in tablet mode.  Although my wife was not happy about being forced to use Windows 8, she has come around.  Windows 8 on a Tablet PC is far better than Windows 8 on a laptop.

The touchpad is actually pretty annoying.  To save space, almost the entire surface of the touchpad can be used to move the mouse.  That includes the space on top of the buttons.  This means you regularly move the mouse while trying to click on something.  This gets annoying really fast.  If you look/feel around the touchpad, you will see/feel a horizontal line across the very bottom of the pad.  That line is the bottom of the "touch area" of the track pad.  If you use the tip of your finger, you can left-click without moving the mouse.  Another thing that is annoying about this design is you can't keep your finger on your left mouse button.  I have a habit of keeping my finger on the bottom while moving my mouse.  If you do that, you will find that the mouse doesn't move at all.  The touchpad disables the mouse movement when you have two fingers on the touchpad.  Rick click is also frustrating.  When you try to right click after positioning the mouse, you will often get a left click instead of a right click.  This is because the mouse moved slightly causing the "tap" to register instead of the click.  The tap is a left click.  Since the tap happened first, you get a left click instead of a right click.  I am a little more used to left and right clicking properly on this touchpad, but it isn't that much of an issue, since I use the tablet mode over 90% of the time.

We have only had the laptops for less than a month, but so far, we are very happy with them.  I have played around a lot with the touch interface and will be posting more details about that.