New laptop is here!

 

Qosmio X505 004Well, I’ve took a plunge and went ahead with my original plans for new laptop. Its finally there, took only 2 days to arrive from US. Yep, it’s an import – first of all, I want US keyboard, second, UK models are not being released for another month, and thirdly – even with shipping costs and duty its significantly cheaper.

First impressions of the screen: DPI is alright (18.1”, 1680x945), no need to zoom up anymore. Brightness is about 2x times more than of my old one (Satellite X200). Viewing angles are wider (mainly due to bigger pixel size). White level is very uniform – but, black is not uniform and it’s not very black. Guess you can not have everything (at least until AMOLED laptop screens will arrive ;) ) I guess brightness is more important though – to diminish visible reflections from glossy screen.

i7 quad core is a total beast – 8 CPUs in Task Manager ;). I plan to keep my old hard drive (WD Scorpio Black), it’s same 320Gb, but faster than preinstalled Hitachi one.

Its wide, but quite thin (about 2 inches only), and power efficiency is excellent for such a beast – finally, small 100W power brick, and 3-4 hours surfing on battery! Old one has 1Kg 200W monstrosity of PSU – it’s really a brick ;)

The audio is excellent (when I’ve disabled preinstalled EQ). That’s why I consider only Toshiba laptops lately – can’t really beat Harman/kardon speaker systems they use.

Now busy copying & reinstalling. Preinstalled Windows 7 Home Premium has ton of unneeded crap already installed (and god knows which internal “enhancements” to the registry made by Toshiba). So, as usual, first thing to do – re-format, do a clean Home Premium install. Then I plan to use Anytime Upgrade to purchase Ultimate - I want Bitlocker and Remote Desktop. Fun ;)

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