Toshiba Satellite Laptop (U405D S2874)

The Toshiba Satellite. My first laptop ever that turned out to be an outstanding choice for me.

I'm a musician, gamer, and occasional artist. I needed something that gave me enough CPU power to mix and master production quality music, but enough portability to do this on the go. Something that could handle realtime mixing of audio and MIDI tracks... orchestral soundscapes, electric guitars, and intricate synth pads. The Toshiba Satellite handles this well, especially with a dual core CPU.

I'm an old school gamer, so I wanted something that was powerful enough to run console emulators, and do it all on the go. N64 and PSX emulators? No problem. The Radeon 3100 built into the laptop, handles 2D and 3D graphics nicely. I got smooth framerates running all my favorite games on this laptop. Windows Aero in Windows 7 is also very smooth and nice on the Toshiba Satellite.

I also enjoy using visual software suites for graphics design. Photoshop, After Effects, GIMP... you name it. I had very few issues using these programs on this laptop. RAM is important here. The Toshiba Satellite has 4GB of RAM. 4GB is great for multitasking and graphics.

Is it the perfect laptop? No. Are there faster and better ones on the market? You bet. Considering the price, this laptop is hard to beat for the quality. So all in all, my experience with the Toshiba Satellite U405d s2874 was great. I'm sure there are others out there who have had great experiences and bad experiences with their laptops, but mine was definitely positive. That's my 2 cents.