the best amongst the "cheaper" laptops

[Jun aka Pekto]

I just bought a Toshiba Satellite A-215 for $900

AMD Turion X2 1.8ghz dualcore
2gb ram
250gb SATA 4200rpm hard drive
ATI X1200 Mobility Radeon
15.4" TruBrite widescreen 1280x800 WXGA
8x Pioneer DL DVD Writer
SD card / 5 in 1 reader
ExpressCard slot
4 x USB2
1 x 4-pin FW
1.3mp Webcam
VGA Out
S-Video Out
Atheros WiFi-b,g
modem
10/100 LAN

Vista Home Premium
Ulead DVD MovieFactory 5
Toshiba CD/DVD Suite equivalent to Nero/Roxio
Restore discs
Bloatware I don't care for

Not a bad system at all. It takes around 2-2.5 hours average to convert a DVD movie .vob to a 700mb Xvid avi via AutoGK. Then, it takes around 30 min average to convert that Xvid file (via Videora for iPod) to an iPod mp4 for use on my PSP. No lag issues even with a 4200rpm hard drive.

Gaming performance is better than the GMA950 but not as good as the X3100. Games like Dawn of War and Rome: Total War ran just fine. OpenGL is slow though. So, no Doom3/Quake4 and other 3d-intensive FPS. That's ok. I didn't really intend to game with it.

It handled Vista Home Premium on par with RC1 on my X2 4200+ which is quite well. No driver issues. Video driver is the full-blown ATI Catalyst, not the lame MS one. All the software issues I had with RC1 are gone with the retail version of Vista.