Toshiba Satellite P200 RT9 Review
by Pierre Boisvenue. 13/08/2007 7:44:27 AM
It has been difficult to choose a new laptop since my single core Sony Vaio was to slow for software development and was not fully Vista compatible. The
difficulty was with the
fact that a transition to the new Santa Rosa platform was being distributed during the summer of 2007 and waited a few months before
deciding on a purchase. This is my first high end laptop. At 17”, it is larger and heavier to what I’m used to but knew that before
hand. I guess the reason why it’s sometime referred as a desktop replacement. The unit came with Vista Home Premium, 2 Gig of Ram, a 200 Gig hard drive and a DirectX 10 ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2006.
Performance wise it’s has good if not better that my Single core Pentium D
desktop. The initial boot up process took about 1 hour. The process takes a
while since it uses a hidden partition to restored and create a Vista instance
in the language of your choice and in my case it was either English or French.
Now I’m not sure if its Toshiba’s or Microsoft’s decision to create a vista
instance taking the entire drive has a single large partition, I am disappointed
with this setup. I needed to make sure that I could dual boot with Windows XP
SP2 just in case Vista was just not
prime time for hosting Visual Studio 2005
and SQL Server 2005. After some testing I can say that VS2005 and SQL Server
2005 can be installed in both XP and Vista. The installation order and the fact
that SQL server express was previously installed caused me some grief however.
In order to shrink the partition down for dual booting with XP I tried Partition
Magic 8. No success with PM8 I relied on the built in shrink facility in vista
and defrag. Using this method allowed me to gain some space however did not
managed to get enough free space for my taste. After some searching I turned off
paging and the system restored feature so I could get more space. I did get more
but yet not enough. Now this was getting on my nerves and stared cursing
Toshiba/Microsoft for not allowing managing my own disk space to my licking. I
then read someone that had some luck with third party defrag too called PerfectDisk.
It turned out that the Vista defrag tool is not that efficient and
PerfectDisk did a much better job.
At the end of the day however I was left with a much larger 60G partition need
for Vista.Of course I could always reformat and install XP first followed by
Vista after rearranging the partitions to my licking.
Now this laptop is designed for Vista and all drivers for it are on Toshiba.ca
website. What about XP? Well I can say that that XP installs fine and that my
wireless network card is active. I had to search elsewhere for the wireless card
driver and sound driver. Unfortunately I could not find an XP video driver for
the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2006.
Overall I find the transition for XP to Vista has being costly and painful.
Installing XP on after a Vista installation was also painful.
I was debating if I should return the unit before the 14 days grace period and simply buy a high
end XP only dual core laptop but they are very difficult to find. My main
requirements in a laptop where that I could develop .NET code in both Windows XP
and Vista and gain IIS 7 in Vista experience along with SQL Server 2005. DX9
and DX10 gaming is a bonus add on for sure. The XP installation is usable with
Office XP, Vs2005 and SQL server 2005 however the Hotkeys Zoom utility and video
driver cannot be found.
The unit feels very solidly built with USB ports on both sides and have yet to
try an HD DVD movie. The keyboard left shift key will take some getting used to along with the Del, home
and insert keys but it’s not too bad. Battery life is very low at about 1 to 1 ½
hours using WIFI and was expected.
UPDATE: By accident I have noticed that the Toshiba A200 specs are very similar
to the P200 and decided to give them a try. I can happily report that most XP
drivers took including the ATI
Mobility Radeon HD 2600.
Toshiba Satellite P200 RT9 Review, VISTA, Xp SP2, Partition, Laptop, Ati Mobility Radeon HD 2006
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