www.ditl.org

Well my old laptop was quite adequate for it's uses (it is a secondary machine to my desktop at home anyway) but it was a bit smallish in the screen for my tastes and I just got the bug I guess.

old -> http://www.cnet.com/laptops/toshiba-sat ... 81158.html
new ->http://www.toshiba.com/us/computers/lap ... P55t-A5202

I wasn't specifically looking for Toshiba but the old one treated me well and the new one seems a tremendous value for it's price. At $700 (on sale at the time, though it looks good at $800 too) it's got a full 1080p touch screen, a backlit keyboard with a 10-key numeric keypad, integrated bluetooth, plenty of USB (4 including 2 USB3) and it does have a DVD-RW drive. The last feature is something I looked for since it still comes in handy for a few reasons for me.

Plus, though the machine it replaced wasn't particularly ugly, the new one is just fine looking.

... and I also swapped out the 750 GB HDD for a 250 GB SSD too. Windows 8.1 (the preinstalled OS) now boots in about 5-10 seconds. My TV and printer take longer to wake up than this does to boot cold. That does raise the effective price a bit but in for a penny in for a pound (and I still like the features). The original HDD has moved into a portable enclosure into it's second life as a portable HDD, while the old laptop I formatted and sold off.

Ooo that is a sexy bit of machinery. Out of curiosity, if you have a keyboard and touchpad, how often do you find yourself using the touch screen and in what ways?

I've ended up using a mix of the touchpad and touch-screen. The touchpad is a little more precise but the little flicks from the side and other Windows 8 gestures make it seem more natural. Also, I've learned that you can do a right-click on the touchscreen with a "tap and hold" - hold your finger for about a second until a box appears around the point you touched, then the right-click menu appears when you release.

The obvious downside is that I frequently end up wiping finger smudges off the screen.

I haven't used the virtual keybaord yet though.

Not a huge fan of toshibas, the only laptop that ever failed on me was one, every other one just got old and slow.

Eh, every laptop brand will have some failures. In general, we don't see too many serious problems on Toshiba laptops at the shop here though.

I hate Toshiba. Everything I ever owned that was Toshiba broke early. The final straw was a 2 TB external hard drive that broke after only two months. In fact in hindsight the thing wasn't working that well when I first got it.

I just recently upgraded my laptop too. Used to run the HP G60. Upgraded a few weeks ago to the Asus Vivobook.

Processor: Pentium Dual Core -> i7 Quad Core
RAM: 3GB -> 8GB
HDD: 320GB -> 500GB

This thing runs like a dream. lighter, slimmer, and much much faster.

Similarly to the above the only laptop I've had that died earlier than expected was one of the first of the Satellite range. Otherwise all my laptops, mostly Acers and HPs, have been stalwart. My current Lenovo seems nigh on indestructible.

I have a Vaio which is fine, only bad bit is a scratched screen from where the ceiling collapsed on it.

Tough crowd, huh? My experience at the computer shop suggests that Toshiba is certainly no less reliable than any other major laptop brand.

See logically I know I just got unlucky with my laptop, and it could happen with anything. But that one experience totally ruined Toshiba for me, I know I have talked multiple people out of buying them in the past. Granted when I complained their Customer Service was shit, which has a lot to do with it as well. Hell of all the computers I've had, the best Customer Service I ever had was from Dell...