Toshiba NB505 N508BL - 10.1" - Atom N455 - Windows 7 Starter - 1 GB RAM - 250 GB HDD

• Average user rating: 4.0 stars out of 2 reviews
• My rating: 0 stars

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• 8 stars

  Great Netbook!

  by Jesse-Manhart on June 11, 2011

  Pros: Good value, light, good battery life, good wireless, feels comfortable and quality made, more powerful than might be expected.

  Cons: Windows 7 Starter is embarrassingly inadequate, Speakers are a little quiet, Webcam is OK.

  Summary: I have had this netbook for a few weeks now. All things considered, I am very happy with it. Since it is a netbook, it is not suitable for gaming ...

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  Summary: I have had this netbook for a few weeks now. All things considered, I am very happy with it. Since it is a netbook, it is not suitable for gaming or really anything very processor or memory intensive. But as a 2nd computer for travel or work, it's great.
  
  I was worried that with such little RAM it might be difficult to multitask and/or keep open multiple internet tabs, but it handled several Firefox windows with several tabs a piece just fine. It also showed no problems when I added playing music (using Foobar playing FLAC). When I played HD video (using VLC) it did hiccup noticeably at times but below 720p it worked just fine. I had no problems using Excel or Word.
  
  The package as a whole is good. It's light, comfortable and doesn't feel cheap. For being so small, it was actually pretty easy for me, a desktop user, to migrate to this keyboard. The touch mouse works well. The wireless seems to have very decent range and reception. The battery life is better than what I expected and I have run it for more than 5 hours with it still going strong. The built-in webcam is OK; good for Skype and the like but not exceptional. The built-in speaker(s) are pretty quiet and the sound is not great (though I wasn't really expecting it to be and with my really nice headphones, it sounds great). It has a decent amount of USB slots and I like that it has a SD card reader.
  
  The biggest complaint (and only serious one) that I have is that it comes with Windows 7 Starter. I was expecting no frills, but it is about as bare bones as you can get. This became evident when I found out I cannot even change the desktop wallpaper. Windows 7 Starter is a joke and a bad one at that. You will want to upgrade to Windows Home Premium.
  
  Conclusion: It's a very nice netbook and a good value for what you get. I am glad that I got it. As long as you don't ask it to do what it wasn't designed to do, it works very well. I recommend it.
  
  *** P.S. If you will buy this Netbook I suggest you have compare price before you decide at: www.amazon.com/gp/*************?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%****%2Foffer-listing%2FB004G8QZPG%3Fie%3DUTF8%26ref_%3Ddp_olp_new%26condition%3Dnew%23&tag=***************&********=ur2&camp=1789&creative=390957

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  10 out of 10 users found this user opinion helpful.

• 9 stars

  Outstanding computer for portability at a good price.

  by nsew45 on April 7, 2011

  Pros: Works well out of the box. Very light and portable. More than adequate hard disk capacity. Good enough graphics. Performance is good with 2GB memory upgrade. Battery life is excellent at +/- 8 hours. I highly recommend the Toshiba N508BL.

  Cons: Cost of Windows 7 Starter to Windows 7 Pro. upgrade.

  Summary: I was looking to replace my aging laptop that cannot be upgraded to Windows 7. I wanted portability and low weight. I compared similar netbooks at a local retailer with ...

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  Summary: I was looking to replace my aging laptop that cannot be upgraded to Windows 7. I wanted portability and low weight. I compared similar netbooks at a local retailer with a good selection of netbooks. The Toshiba N508BL had a good appearance, light weight, crisp display, 250 GB hard drive, camera, 3 USB ports, video output, SD card reader, microphone input and audio output. The cost for a 2GB memory upgrade was less than $40.
  
  The Toshiba worked right out of the box. I had no concerns. The memory upgrade was very simple and went without problem.
  
  My favorite free antivirus would not install on Windows 7 starter. I also wanted to run DeLorme's TopoNA 9.0 with a PN-60w SE with SPOT. The TopoNA 9 requires Windows. Windows upgrade to Pro is $120 plus another $40 for media and shipping.
  
  The Toshiba comes with a camera, wireless or LAN networking. The Toshiba interfaces well with external monitor, mouse and keyboard. I have not experienced any problems with compatibility. There are several options for disaster recovery. Toshiba provides a partition on the hard drive to recover back to Windows 7 Starter and supplied applications.The Toshiba recovery will write to a USB flash drive of 8GB or larger capacity. The N508BL will boot from a USB flash drive. Windows 7 doesn't want to readily write to a USB flash drive without a lot of research and work. An external DVD/CD burner is required for Windows recovery media.
  
  So far, the Toshiba N508BL is a good replacement for my desktop and laptop at about 1/3 the cost of a new laptop or desktop.
  
  The performance is better than I expected.

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  1 out of 1 users found this user opinion helpful.

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