This is a very popular Pentium M Centrino 15.4" widescreen and it has done very well. The M35S456 was the first retail model to have the Toshiba XGA Trubrite LCD (similar to Sony Xbrite and now HP/Compaq Briteview available on custom order notebooks at hpshopping).
I nearly bought the previous Toshiba M35S320 which had a Banias Pentium M 1.5 and no Trubrite but the Compaq X1000 series I bought had a slightly better LCD and a lower price at that time. This is the same as the HPZT3000.
I have heard that this model has been so popular that Toshiba does not have the Trubrite LCD option on their custom order site at all.
You will see many discussions over the Toshiba M35S456 in the past few months on this Cnet Notebook forums so read them yourself.
The only negatives are the fact that the notebook does run a bit hot in the touchpad area and under the notebook (X1000/ZT3000 runs cooler and also has much less fan noise) and also some people don't want to pay the extra $ for a DVD burner (versus a CD-RW/DVD ROM for $200 less).
Both of these notebooks have 64mb dedicated video RAM which is decent but the Acer 2000 series and Dell 8600, etc have 128mb dedicated RAM for gamers.
The Harmon Kardon speakers are quite good for a notebook and have a bit of bass but they are better at lower volumes of course.
The Toshiba DVD burner is also multiformat which is a plus. The HP/Compaq used to be only DVD+ but now they are multiformat as well.
The M35S456 has the Dothan 1.7 735 Pentium M so you have plenty of power and 3.5-4 hours battery life with wi-fi on or longer with it off (running a widescreen DVD will be a similar timeframe to wi-fi use).
Retail price is $1999 but you can find it on sale at times for $1850 after rebates or even $1799 once at Compusa if you are patient.
THe unit has a 4200rpm hard drive which is not ideal but you can only get a 5400 rpm or higher on a custom order notebook like the HPZT3000 or Compaq X1000 online (their retail notebooks have the same issues).
See Circuit City's website for the Toshiba M35S456 -- they have many positive user comments there. The Cnet review was below the 8.1 of the X1000 and 8.0 of the ZT3000 but the review was done on an older Toshiba M35 before it got the Trubrite LCD and Dothan Pentium M with the 2mb L2 system cache (double that of earlier Banias CPU's)
Also, see notebookforums.com for toshiba postings or X1000forums.com if you want to see an alternative from HP/Compaq (and an outstanding dedicated forum).
HP/Compaq does allow you to fully customize and order less RAM (256mb) and order 512mb later on your own for less than you would pay the manufacturer for 256mb more. Also, you can get the 5400rpm hard drive (up to 50% faster seek time) and the Briteview XGA LCD or higher SXGA or UXGA resolutions. And they have a $100 custom order rebate and a 6% student APP discount that can get you between $1,000 and $1,500 after discounts --especially if you don't need the DVD burner.
After going thru some 'exercises' to determine my most favorable options in my needs for a laptop, one of my 'best' choices comes to the Toshiba M35-S456. I've checked several of the rating sites and really found very little in the way of much 'reinforcement' to purchase this notebook.
Is it maybe a poor choice or are there not enough of them out there where people have come forth to rate this model?
I'd appreciate anyone's input about this model.
Thanks in advance for your time and consideration,

Chowhound
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