We bought our Satellite two years ago, to replace an old (but still working) HP laptop. We don't like changing brands, but the deal was good enough we felt we had to do it. And look at that screen! We like the fact that the screen is a native 1280 x 800 pixels, not squished or otherwise distorted. The colors are good when you have the brightness full up, even in daylight.

Ours has an 80GB hard drive, plenty for a "second system", our intended use. You can buy bigger drives for a fair price now, but this is not a storage system, just a portable computer for away-from-home.

The machine has 512MB memory. We're planning on an upgrade to 1GB, as it seems to page quite a bit if more than one application is running. We typically have several background tasks running, like the network printer interface, wireless portal (AT&T), Zone Alarm. On occasion, we run Dragon Naturally Speaking, a voice-to-text program we'll review in a separate article in the near future. That's a bunch under Windows XP! So the upgrade is justified.

There's a LOT of hullabaloo about this and related Toshiba models having a factory defect that causes them to reboot, crash, lock up, etc. We've received the paperwork on the class-action suit, but we don't expect to get rich from this design flaw. We've had a few unexplained reboots of the system, and a few lockups over the past two years, but we could not attribute them to "static" or other specific issues. Perhaps we'll take it in under the free extended warranty granted by the class action suit (through November 2007) and see if they can "fix" it. We always worry when someone else touches our PERSONAL computer. We'd rather just burn it and replace it!

The keyboard is flat, has a standard layout, with a "phantom" numeric keypad activated by holding the Fn key and touching a group of selected keys. Laptops typically have a non-standard keyboard layout, and this is no exception. There is some thought exhibited in the layout for Home, PgUp, PgDn, End keys located vertically on the right side to the keyboard, but INS and DEL are at the bottom, abd we always have to look for them. Cursor controls are in the lower right corner.

There are also some multi-media dedicated keys on the left side of the keyboard. They allow you to play CD's and DVD's without running an application. Stick the disc in, and press a button to start it playing.

The function keys have Fn functions like brightness control, volume control, video management, etc. The mouse control touch-pad is intuitive, with drivers that allow you to "click" with a touch, or to defeat the touch-pad. I've used THAT, as I have lazy thumbs that make a mess when I'm trying to type, and they keep hitting the touchpad.

We like all the peripherals included. It has wireless 2.4Ghz 801.g that linked perfectly with our household wireless system first time up. It has a CD/DVD burner. There's a mechanical volume control on the right front, along with MIC and headphone jacks, easy to access. Also, there's a switch to turn off the wireless transceiver, a USB port, and an S400 port. There's also a SmartMedia memory card slot, and a standard mini-card slot for peripherals (if you can think of one you need!)

On the back are the battery-recharge jack (yes, it has the ever-present BRICK charger), VGA and S-Video jacks, two more USB jacks, and a modem and Ethernet 10/100 jack. There's also something we never use, looks like an infrared port. On the left side, you'll find the CD/DVD burner.

On the bottom are all the labels and identifications, plus a single-screw door for access to the memory card slots (2 provided, we have only one installed). The battery is removable by releasing a lock slide, and another slide. We've NEVER removed the battery, and (knock on wood) the battery has held up VERY well for the last two years, still over an hour of WORK time before it starts reporting low battery. When the battery goes low enough, the system hibernates, saving the machine state until you have enough power to run.

There's a screen timeout, disk-drive time-out, and a CPU speed control that all contribute to long life for the battery, and maximum life from a charge.

Lots of software came with this system. We've had to rebuild from scratch ONCE when a virus got in and messed things up. It was a relatively painless process, as the factory image is storeg on the hard drive in a separate partition. Biggest problem was removing all the try-and-buy software packages that you get with the factory install.

The CPU speed of 1.6Ghz is fast enough for most applications, although Dragon taxes it thoroughly. We're hoping memory will improve performance some.

You won't be buying one of these new, but we'd guess, from our experience, that it would be a good buy as a used system, as long as the dreaded static fix has been applied by a repair center. We have had little enough trouble that it's been unnecessary to take it in, may never.

We love the portability, especially in the car. We plug a DeLorme GPS into one of the USB ports, start up DeLorme's Streets and Highways software, and do the GPS thing whenever we travel, even when we know where we're going. It's great to have a point of reference, and an ETA is always displayed. But that's another review!

We'd recommend this laptop, with the cautions above.
Addendum 3/2008: We've replaced the single 500MB memory module in this system with two 1GB modules. The performance increase is STUNNING! Highly recommended!