Toshiba - Satellite 17.3" Laptop - 4GB Memory - 500GB Hard Drive C875D/S7105

Alright, So i have been working on laptops for a long time and this one really makes me gripe. I will say the good. Its 4 gigs of ram which most people wont use more than that. The screen resolution is absolutely stellar and with some slight tweaks with color management, it looks incredible. Battery life is fair. The dual core wouldn't fit my needs but for someone just browsing Facebook and doing word processing, you don't need much more than a dual core.

Lets move onto the bad. First thing is the SATA restricter. What that means is your hard drive is going to be slowed down. Not by 5% but we are talking 89%. A standard drive should be able to cycle at 62mb/s. Its your standard speed you should be looking for when it comes to most drives. Toshiba thought it would be brilliant to throttle the thing down to 7mb/s maximum. Plugged the drive into my desktop and cycles fine. Plugged an SSD (500mb/s drive) and once again throttled to about 5mb/s (which crashed my drive). That is outragiously slow and it is a pain just to try and install programs or move a movie onto the computer.

Second issue is with Windows 8 and this laptop. I am a Microsoft employee. Dont get me wrong; I enjoy and use 8 daily.... on my tablet. But this computer does not have a touch screen which makes using Windows 8 extremely difficult. That and the fact that the standard layout that has been used for almost 20 years has been completely altered has defered most people from the operating system. If it had a touch screen i wouldnt be saying such negative things, but this laptop should come stock with Windows 7. Here is the fun part; You cant install any other operating system out of the box. Took me a while to figure this out but you have to go into the BIOS (mash f12 when you power on the computer and hit like computer management or something like that). Then first you have to disable the Secure Boot option. This makes you able to boot into a DVD or other drive. But then you have to go into your SATA options and change the drive readout from UFEI to CSM. This makes you able to boot into non UFEI operating systems and drives (Which is just about EVERY operating system to date).

In total, after I installed 7, it did what it needed to. Had a hell of a time finding drivers but google "875D Driver for Windows 7 blogspot" and it is the second link down. I will also leave a link at the bottom for you. I am still trying to figure out how to disable the hard drive speed cap but once i disable that, this laptop would be perfect. No other complaints and especially for the price. Wish it came with a quad core also but it does leave an extra slot open so you can buy a 4 gig memory stick (like $29) and stick it in for 8 gigs. Glad to see it was 1 4gig instead of 2 2gigs. Made me happy with that, When i figure out about the Hard drive issues, i will post them.

Cheers!!!

Windows 7 drivers for this computer: (I used AMD display 8.942, realtek Wireless LAN 2.00, Realtek Eithernet 7.48 and that got everything up and running i saw. Should be the same for yours)

Save 12% Off