Toshiba Satellite A355-S6931 16.0-Inch Laptop

This is my second Toshiba laptop. Number one is around 4 years old and still works well.

This review is more about the A355 chassis, than this exact spec laptop, and should apply to just about every one of the laptops in this series whether they run AMD or Intel chips.

The first view is that the materials are just plain flat out gorgeous. From the shiny exterior, to the semi rounded base, the two large chrome mouse buttons, the nicely integrated Harmon Kardon speakers, the illuminated touch areas, the big beautiful monitor, and those shiny keys. Yes this is one very pretty computer.

Under that pretty hood are some interesting specs. It used to be incredibly rare to see an eSATA port on any computer, let alone a laptop. Well this one has exactly that an eSATA port that doubles as a USB port. Nice option to hook up external hard drives. It also includes an iLink, Firewire, or IEEE-1394 port an incredible rarity (even Apple dropped this port). The audio ports and volume control are on the front, nicely placed. There's absolutely no ports on the rear. There's also an express card slot (not a PCMCIA slot, but EXPRESS card slot) and a multi flash memory card reader (they've dropped CF from the list). It does not include Bluetooth a very strange omission since every single bluetooth adapter uses the Toshiba stack to run. Use either of these adapters, they work perfectly: IOGear GBU421 Bluetooth 2.0 USB Micro Adapter or Cirago BTA3210 Class 2 Micro Bluetooth Adapter (Black Tip) both are outstanding miniscule adapters.

Toshiba stuffed 4Gb of RAM and a 320Gb hard drive into this big baby. Those are some pretty nice features in a laptop this inexpensive. Those Harmon Kardon speakers sound very nice.

You'll either hate this or love it, and fortunately you can turn this off if you hate it. The Toshiba name, a little band above the scratchy navigation pad, and the media buttons all light up white (pretty bright at that). I think it looks pretty cool, but others have hated all those lights.

The monitor, oh that monitor is gorgeous. Movies pop, they look absolutely fantastic on this computer. It's a nice big screen. Yes it is a gloss finish and you do get some reflections here or there, but generally it's not bad.

June 2009 Update my son managed to crack the display. I can see no reason to blame the design nor Toshiba for this crack. Thank goodness I have a 3 year no fault warranty which replaced the screen at no charge (well they charged for the policy). I would not be surprised if my football player son fell asleep and rolled over on top of his laptop. No company in the world can design around that scenario at this price point (yeah you can buy a toughbook but it's way more expensive than this one). Huge display, light weight... no elephant can stand on this baby and not expect it to break. Downside to all this, he's been without this computer for 2 weeks and is driving me crazy (again, not Toshiba's fault).

The keys are all glossy and the fanatical among you might not like all the visible fingerprints, but I think most will get over that quickly. There is just a ton of room to put your hands to type and use the computer. That surface in front is sweet for a palm rest.

Function-wise, this computer is a decent performer. Nobody is buying this to run heavy games or render video it won't do those things. But for the occasional game, the occasional video edit, you'll score well here.

Do note, this computer runs Windows Vista Premium 64-Bit. Please don't be afraid of that operating system. I'm running 64 bit on two computers and it runs just beautifully. There is almost no new hardware that won't run under 64 bit these days. It's a rock solid platform. And that OS allows all 4Gb of memory to be seen and used (32 bit tops out at 3Gb). And if you don't believe me, type this into google pcmag 64 bit computing. Read the first article in that hit list.

This is no lightweight computer. It's a big, pretty heavy laptop. Great for around the house. Not something you would travel everywhere with. But it is portable. Heat generation is nothing extreme. It does pull air in from below, so be careful about couches or beds plugging those holes.

It's a good solid fast computer. There's a bit of fan noise, nothing huge, but you will know the machine is running. I hate to comment on battery life, that's so dependent on how bright you make the screen, processor speed settings and the like. I got a good solid 2 hours of hitting it very hard at max everything. You could probably get a good 3 hours, maybe 4 at more conservative settings.

Something to keep in mind, Toshiba ships all their laptops full of bloat-ware. It's a really good idea to remove it all. Almost none of it is necessary. There are two websites that will clear all that garbage out of your computer. It's explained in a great article at PCMag. Type this into google, PCMag make the most out of your new pc. The first hit will be a fantatstic article on how to remove the garbage.

Overall, this is a big, beautiful, good sounding, heavy, hard working, well priced laptop.

I needed a third computer for use when I was away from my desktop system and ultra portable light weight.

I chose this system which had the better processor but the video processor intergrated with the chip.

Clearly, for hard gamers and intensive video processing, the systems with the seperate video memory is necessary. However, for surfing the net or performing editing, the system is fine.

I have had no problems with Vista 64. The sytem booted up without a problem and instantly connected with my WIFI /n system.

There is a fair amount of crapware, but it can be easily removed through a variety of programs or simply removing the programs in the uninstall aspect of the control panel.

The screen is great and the key board is one of the nicest I've had in a laptop.

For the price, the system has a great screen, excellent keyboard, DVD/CD player and burner with a fast chip and tons of RAM.

I would not hesitate to recommend this unit to anyone. Gamers will need a faster video card

Buy Toshiba Satellite A355-S6931 16.0-Inch Laptop Now

Again this machine has no HDMI port. I suspect that the eSATA port is mistakenly identified as an HDMI port. No other source of this machines description seems to have an HDMI port listed.

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I've had this laptop for just over a week. I was slightly skeptical about running Vista, but I've had no problems with it thus far. This is my second Toshiba my first is four years old and cost more than double this one at the time. For $650, this is a great deal. I was worried the screen was too big at first (yes, too big!) but I love it for watching Hulu, videos, etc. It's not heavy, although I don't move it very much from my desk. Battery life is OK not Toshiba's strong suit by any means, but it's not terrible. You just have to remember to run it down periodically. In terms of bloatware not horrible. Easy to delete. In terms of restore disks you can create them with the utility provided. I made three backup DVDs the first day I had it, no problems. As far as the fingerprints go yeah, it's kind of an issue, but it's not terrible. You get used to it or you use the microfiber cloth provided to wipe them off. Generally speaking, I am very happy with this machine. It has plenty of RAM, disk space, etc. For the casual home user, it's perfect. I'm not a gamer or website developer, so I don't require a ton of power. Bang for the buck, it's fantastic.

Drawback: periodically, my typing skips around on the screen. Not sure if this is because I type very fast, or a flaw in the OS, or what -but it's annoying. Not insurmountable, but annoying.

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This computer is very fast after 4-days of configurations/tune-ups. No complain about the hardware, or Vista (Vista is actually very good, but I'm buying this one in order to upgrade it to Windows 7). After I deleted most of the crapware, the computer ranked to be 'top 12% computers in the world' by PCPitStop.com. Now with all kinds of software installed, including Windows 7 RC on drive E:, 2 external hard drives hooked up, it is a 'top 18%' computer when running at full power/High Performance (Balanced and Power Saver dropped it to 28% and below 48% respectively). (Update: The Toshiba Face Recognition works so well every time, I don't need to type the password for sign on anymore.)

The computer unboxed with warped keyboard which I have to push it down hard in order to settle it in, but the function key portion is still higher than the frame in the middle. One very noticeable thing is that the computer's touch pad, wrist rest areas are very hot. the touch pad chrome buttons are hot like a coffee mug at all time. Don't know whether this will be a trouble or not for me in the future (July 16, 2009 update: The hot touch pad should not be a problem. The heat is not coming from the hard drive. The reason it is hot is because I have connected the computer on power cord at all time and have the battery removed. Hence the heat sensor does not detect the high temperature at the battery region and the fan dose not run all the time).