Toshiba Satellite L305-S5877 (15.4" - Core 2 Duo T5750 - Vista Home Premium - 3 GB RAM - 200 GB HDD)

Although everything other than the durability of the keyboard and mouse buttons are great on this machine, these incredibly poorly designed mouse buttons contaminate the entire summary of quality of this machine. Its kind of like saying, it is a great car other than the fact that the pedals don't work. There is one tiny piece of plastic supporting both mouse buttons and it would be more shocking if these didn't quickly break. At first support was good and then they stopped supporting it and took no responsibility. Now I am stuck with a laptop that I always have to bring an external mouse to use.

Updated on Feb 14, 2011

"There is one tiny piece of plastic supporting both mouse buttons and it would be more shocking if these didn't quickly break, than if they did break."

I have found this notebook to be quite good at multi-tasking. It runs many programs at once without much impact on performance, even while running virus scans with multiple programs. The battery life has also exceeded my expectations. Of course, my expectations for laptop battery life are generally low in the first place, but battery times were much better than expected. Run it on a low brightness setting for best performance. It's a little heavy and large, my medium-sized Camelbak backpack has some trouble fitting it when I need to carry books. It has a large keyboard layout, which I found very ergonomic. Many laptop keyboards are too small and cause my hands to become cramped. Overall, given the price, performance, large screen, quality of build, and battery performance up to this point, this Toshiba as lived up to my expectations. I would recommend it.