Saturday, August 25, 2007

Toshiba Satellite M200 Notebook

I recently got a new notebook, a free gift that came with the car i bought. It's just a cheap local car, so I was rather surprised to a get a RM3K free gift. I was delivered 6 weeks after the car, was supposed to be an M100, but was upgraded to M200 because the M100 is obsolete.

Here's the spec sheet:
Intel Centrino Duo (1.86Ghz)
Intel GMA950 Video
512MB DDR2-667 RAM (Upgraded to 1536MB for RM150)
80GB SATA Hard Drive
Intel Pro Wireless 3945a/b/g
Bluetooth 2.0
1.3 MP webcam

Not exactly high-end, but pretty decent notebook.

I quickly tested both Ubuntu and Mandriva on it. Both worked well. Ubuntu even picked up & setup all the hotkeys. Mandriva needed lineak to make use of the hotkeys.

A couple of things expectedly did not work out.
- The webcam worked but has poor color correction. (It was gray most of the time & tweaking had no effect)
- Some of the hotkeys are not working. Most notably, Brightness control, Touchpad toggle, Lock System, Hibernate, Media & Wireless radio on/off button.
- The ones that did work are: Mute, Volume, Wireless device on/off switch, Web, Play/pause/stop/prev/next, Suspend and Toggle Display. (These all worked out of box in Ubuntu & Mandriva's GNOME, but required tweaking lineak in KDE + the omnibook module)
- The most pressing issue with the notebook is that it's LCD is stuck at the highest brightness all the time, with the controls not working + unplugging the adapter does not dim the LCD.

Toshiba is really relying too heavily on software utilities to supply all the functionality instead of building all these things into the BIOS like they should be, heck the BIOS is just a very simplistic and completely useless Phoenix BIOS.

In the supplied Windows Vista Basic nothing worked until the ToshUtil program fully loaded-up, and that took some time as it is a seriously bloated application. I tried loading it up with WinXP SP2, then found out there were no drivers for it at all, this system ONLY works with Vista. Through some research I discovered this is one of those non-toshiba toshibas that were probably made by Compal or Quanta, one of these Taiwan Notebook ODMs.

My advice, if you're looking for a notebook to run Linux on, buy a Dell Inspiron/Latitude. Forget Toshibas, they're not worth it.

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