Toshiba Satellite P100-347

Ive had this laptop since September 2006, great specs for an XP machine, but no way ready for Vista.

Build quality is fairly unsatisfactory on mine, battery has never worked and attempts of repair are met with sending them the laptop for uo to 4 weeks.

Screen size is lovely and the 17" really makes a difference, its very pleasant to work with and can handle a nice range of resolutions.

graphics card is mid range for what the laptop is really marketed as - I would personally look for an ATI x1700 laptop if you are looking for a cheaper Gaming laptop.

Hard disk on mine leaves a little to be desired at only 60gb but i believe some of the newer models now ship with a 100gb hard drive - but in these the graphics card has been sacrificed which in my opinion is one of the redeeming features of this laptop.

For your average user the 1.6ghz Centrino Duo is ample, but not really suited to higher end stuff like photo editting

The memory at 1gb is fine for windows Xp but could ideally use 2gb for Vista.

Please also note that this machine will greet you with errors every time you boot up in Vista due to it Having the Sonic solutions DLA driver installed - and so far as far as I know there isnt a fix - so it will prompt you 5 times before letting you bypass it.

Battery pack is quite large by comparison but due to the screen size and power consumption - dont expect to use it on battery for long anyway.

Addition of Bluetooth is a nice touch and of course as most laptops these days it comes with Wifi, it also has plenty of well placed USB ports and the nice addition of an SD card slot on the front

Overall its a nice mid range laptop but if you can afford it go for one of the higher models in the range.