Oh Lorelai, how I love thee!
Written: Jul 07 '01
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Pros: GeForce2 GO graphics, best gaming laptop hardware available.
Cons: None, this laptop is about as good as it gets.
The Bottom Line: If you want a laptop that can replace a desktop, or just do everything a large computer can, then the 2805-s402 is probably for you.
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| Guildencrantz's Full Review: Toshiba Satellite 2805 |
Yorik has been a good friend and companion for some time now, but he's losing some of his spunk. Besides he's never been the most mobile of friends. Because of this I ended up going in search of a new friend, a portable friend. I wanted the butt-kickingest laptop I could find, and that's when I found the 2805-s402.
I was actually looking for a laptop for quite some time, about six months. I wanted a killer machine but I'm a broke college student. Well a friend of mine came into some money and bought a Toshiba 2805-s402. It's a gorgeous machine, but it was $2,800. Roughly $1,500 more than I could think of spending.
Still this was a really nice machine. It has a GeForce2 GO, 15" screen, 20gig hard drive, 128mb RAM, DVD/CD-RW drive, and a PIII 850. This machine was meant to work hard and play harder. Watching my friend play Unreal Tournament on his laptop with no lag convinced me that this was the machine to get.
My reasons for wanting a machine that can really go process the heck out of anything is that I wish to "disinfect" my desktop, Yorik, and remove Microsoft 98 completely. However I am a gamer and want a machine that can give me the graphics and processing speed needed to play Unreal Tournament and other games that require heavy duty graphics cards and high speed CPUs. While not everybody needs this kind of power in a laptop (okay, so I don't "need" it either, but I'm a geek and am enslaved to my technolust), but if you want a top end laptop that can deal with the rigorous of 3D gaming, then this just might be the laptop for you.
Well, as mentioned above, I couldn't have afforded this laptop when it first came out (about two months ago), but it's dropped about $1,000 (the laptop market is amazingly quick in value changes). I bought my laptop on June 20, 2001 for $2,049 and was able to get a $100 rebate from Toshiba (well, I turned in the rebate information and am awaiting my check). Checking on http://www.pricewatch.com it looks as if the price is still around $2,000.
When I received my laptop I was amazingly happy. I pulled the laptop out of the box, plugged it in, and had it up and running very quickly. There were only a few questions that had to be answered, regarding the time zone and user information mostly, and then I was ready to go. The laptop does come with Microsoft ME pre-installed, but I have not yet had any problem. I am still a little weary because ME is relatively new, but all the pre-installed hardware and software is working wonderfully with no need for tweaking. I have also installed quite a bit of software which has all worked perfectly.
The only preset that I was disappointed in was that "screen stretch" was turned off. Let me explain this a little. The monitor has a 15" screen, which is resolution size 1024x768. If you install a piece of software that uses a resolution of less than this, then you end up with a small window in the middle of a black field. By turning on "screen stretch" (you have to press F2 on boot to get into the BIOS and turn this feature on) the smaller resolution will be stretched to fill the entire screen (the image quality will just be less than if the resolution were at 1024x768). Of course this was not a big deal. It took me about a minute and a half to change the setting, so it's far from a reason not to buy this laptop.
Further use of the laptop really has made me quite happy. I have been able to play Unreal Tournament against friends and have had no problems. The graphics are truly amazing and I was really impressed by the sound quality. Laptops generally have lousy built in speakers, but this laptop has excellent sound with a built in bass boost (just don't expect surround sound, that would by a bit hard). By the way these speakers are powered by the excellent Yamaha DS-XG sound card.
The one thing that wouldn't cut it for gaming was the mouse. The built in mouse is an "eraser" with two standard buttons (top = left, bottom = right) and two scroll buttons (the left button is "scroll up" and the right button is "scroll down"). While this is a fine mouse for regular use gamers will want to get a "normal" external mouse (I chose the IBM USB Optical Navigator Mouse. Optical mice are a particularly great choice for laptops because they can work on just about any surface; mine works fine right on my bed with no hard surface at all, of course you need a hard surface for gaming quality response).
Of course you may not be a gamer. Even so you probably like to watch movies, and this computer comes with a built in DVD-ROM, as well as WinDVD software for playing DVD movies. Most laptops don't play DVD movies that well, but the GeForce2 GO handles the graphical requirements with no problems, and the 15" screen gives excellent picture quality. The speakers that I mentioned earlier also give good stereo output.
If you have a larger TV that you want to use for watching the DVD then you can also do that with the TV out port. The laptop comes with a special cable that connects the proprietary TV out port to the RCA connectors on the TV. One note is that to get the laptops screen image to fit on the TV you need to change your screen resolution to 640x480. On a similar note there is an external monitor port in the back of the laptop. With this you can plug the laptop into an external monitor for watching DVDs or doing just about anything else.
This DVD drive is particularly impressive because it also acts as a CD-RW drive. This means that you can burn CD-Rs and CD-RWs, as well as reading CD-RWs. One wonderfully nice thing is that Toshiba has bundled Adaptec's Easy CD Creator 4 for burning data and musical CDs. DirectCD, which allows you to treat a CD-RW like any floppy media, is also included. The software and hardware work together perfectly and are very nice to have.
While this machine does come with a built in 3.5" floppy drive the one other drive I really want to mention is the SmartMedia drive. This little drive appears as just a slot under the DVD drive, but is very nice. SmartMedia is type of small floppy disk that is commonly used in digital cameras. With the SmartMedia drive instead of being forced to connect your camera to the laptop you can just remove the SmartMedia card from the camera and put the card right into the SmartMedia drive.
As a laptop there is also an assortment of ways to expand the power of this rather confined machine. There is, of course, the standard ports for two type II or one type III PCMCIA cards. In addition there is a parallel (ie: printer) port, RJ45 ethernet port, RJ11 modem port, firewire (IEEE1394) port, two USB ports, and a PS2 (mouse/keyboard) port. This means that there are several ways to attach devices to this little laptop.
The hardware that comes installed in this machine is truly amazing, there is no doubt about that (in my mind at least, if you don't agree that's your fault). The software that it comes with is also pretty great. As I mentioned above Windows ME is the pre-installed operating system, but Microsoft Office is not the office suite installed. Instead this laptop comes with Lotus SmartSuite. SmartSuite is not MS Office compatible, but it is amazingly powerful and easy to learn. I have actually learned to enjoy Word Pro (the word processor in SmartSuite). The customizability and flexibility of the programs is wonderful, but might take a little getting used to.
There is also the standard assortment of games, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and, as mentioned above, both Adaptec's Easy CD Creator with DirectCD and WinDVD. The software makes this computer fully functional right out of the box. While I chose to download the Opera web browser I have pretty much stuck to the pre-installed software for regular use.
Over the last few weeks I have grown to love Lorelai. She is an amazingly powerful and playful laptop. I have installed all kinds of software, including Adobe Photoshop 6, 3D Studio Max 4, Bryce 4, and Poser 4. All of this software is hard on processing power and RAM, but Lorelai has taken it all in stride. No matter the size of the 3D environment that I have tried to render she has not told me that she can't do it, and she has done everything VERY quickly. If you aren't a gamer but do graphical manipulations, then I would have to recommend this laptop.
As I have said over and over I have been amazingly impressed by this machine. Lorelai has held up to everything I could throw at her, and I have tried to throw a lot. She just chugs right through it all and asks for more. Toshiba has come out with a few machines that are better than the 2805-s402, but they are the same thing with a better CPU, more RAM, and a larger hard drive. Still, it's the same computer and I'm sure it would be great. However these machines are more expensive. If you have the money, go for it. If you don't have the money I have not yet found a reason not to buy a 2805-s402, it gets my full endorsement.
ALTERNATIVE OSes:
BeOS
I am not a happy sheep. In general I find Microsoft operating systems to be unreliable, so I use BeOS as my primary operating system on my desktop. Because I have grown to love BeOS and like to write code in BeOS rather than Windows I decided to try and install BeOS.
Well I set aside 2gigs of my hard drive (Partition Magic is an amazing program) and I popped the BeOS CD in the drive. Booting to the CD I ran the install and everything went wonderfully. There were only two issues. The first issue is that the GeForce2 GO is not supported by BeOS (even with the Unified Nvidea Drivers available at http://www.bebits.com). This means that if you want to use this laptop with BeOS you are stuck with black and white graphics and a resolution of 640x480. The other problem was that I had no networking.
This was a two part issue because I was trying to use the modem and the ethernet. The modem won't work because it is a Winmodem and is not supported by BeOS at all, you would have to get an external modem if you need to use dialup in BeOS. The other issue was with the ethernet. The Intel Pro 100 ethernet card is not automatically detected by BeOS. You can, however, download a patch from BeBits which takes care of this problem. With in minutes you can have the laptop connected to your network in minutes.
You can get BeOS to run on this machine, but if you want to run BeOS as the primary operating system I would recommend getting a different laptop. This is a great machine, just not for BeOS.
LINUX
While I have not put Linux on Lorelai, I did watch my friend (remember him, the one with the 2805-s402 that I first saw and made me decide to pick up Lorelai) install Red Hat 7.1 on his machine.
He used Partition Magic to create some empty space on his hard drive and ran the Red Hat installer. This went very well, no hitches. While I'm not sure if the modem works (I doubt it, winmodems don't like to work in any operating system other than Windows) or if the DVD drive works as a DVD player (it probably does if you get VLC, but he didn't try) I can say that the ethernet worked.
While Linux was working after the regular install program it needed some tweaking. First off drivers needed to be installed for the GeForce2 GO (they are available from Nvidea). Secondly you need to make sure you have the latest kernel. Then you have to do some source editing to get the sound to work.
There were a lot of accounts of people not getting audio to work on the 2805-s402, but we got it to work. If you search around on http://groups.google.com then you should be able to find some accounts of how to get the audio setup (try searching for Redwin, he's was going to post what we did to get things up and running).
So, as I said before, this is a great system. While BeOS wouldn't be a very good primary operating system on this machine it appears that Linux would be fine. It might even be possible to find Linux drivers for the Winmodem.
My final words are general comments. I love Lorelai. She has been amazingly reliable machine (granted, it has only been a few weeks). She plays hard (Unreal Tournament, Anarchy Online, Black & White, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, and even Worms) yet she puts in lots of time crunching 3D scenes is Poser, 3D Studio Max, and Bryce, and processing computer code in Java and C++, not to mention my Unreal Tournament maps and mods. Lorelai is great. Such a sexy little thing, yet reliable and sturdy. I have no second thoughts about getting this machine and think I'll be playing, and working, with her for quite some time.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 2,049
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 801-900
Screen Size: 15
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
Guildencrantz
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 - Top 1000 |
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Location: Boulder, CO
Reviews written: 405
Trusted by: 160 members
About Me:
My coffee cup has Smurf escape instructions in it.
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