In a comment here last week, Mikey asked for a small review of my Toshiba Tecra M3. Overall, I am very pleased with it. My previous computer was a Thinkpad T30 with a 1.86 GHz CPU and 1Gb of RAM. The Toshiba has a 2GHz CPU and 1.25Gb of RAM, but feels faster than those numbers would suggest, because it has a 7200 RPM disk, one of the prime reasons I chose it. Building this web site (a task that involves a lot of disk and CPU) goes about twice as fast on the Tecra than on the Thinkpad. The 60Gb disk is not gargantuan by today’s standards (some laptops I looked at had 100Gb!), but is 50% larger than my last one, and the speed is great.

The screen is very bright, bright enough that a co-worker on seeing it became angry that his desktop LCD monitor was not as bright.

There’s a lot of attention to saving battery power: there’s a physical switch on the front to disable the wireless networking, and both a systray utility and a Fn-key to turn off power to the CD drive.

But speaking of software utilities: the Toshiba has more than I’ve ever seen. The Add/Remove Programs control panel lists 19 programs whose names start with “Toshiba” (or “TOSHIBA”, can’t they pick one style at least?). And in typical fashion, it feels like many of them duplicate others, or have subtly-different approaches to the same problem, or aggregate the others in confusing ways.

Of course, this infestation of utilities is not limited to Toshiba. The video system is by Nvidia, and their control panel is a blossom of controls which I somehow still had to augment. There’s a separate systray utility just to flip the display 180 degrees, something that would be useful if this were a tablet PC, but it is not. And in the encyclopedia of display options is a panel about rotating the display, but it didn’t include turning off the systray rotator. One last insult: the Nvidia drivers includes a full-blown hotkey facility, which comes pre-configured with one hotkey: Ctrl-Shift-R rotates the display 180 degrees, something I found out by accident. Imagine my surprise!

More negatives: in a very quiet room, I can hear a strange beeping noise from the inside occasionally. This is not a software noise, and I don’t know where it’s coming from. This may be better than a similar problem I had with the Thinkpad, where a few times a day, I’d hear that “bonk” sound played (it’s “Windows XP Critical Stop.wav”), with no program on the screen to take credit for it. I just muted the volume and forgot about it...

Here’s the thing that bugs me about the Tecra, though: the keyboard. The keys are very nice, and all of the reviews will tell you about the full-size keyboard (see the image on this review at Notebook Review). But the placement of the specialty keys is sub-optimal. The Ctrl vs. Fn key is precisely the opposite of the Thinkpad, and drove me nuts while I was using both, but my left pinky has long since gotten over it.

The six-key Ins/Del/Home/End/Up/Down keypad has been split up and stretched along the side. I can sort of use them, but it requires stopping and looking at the keys more than I would like. The real crime, though, is the one I noticed last: there is no right Ctrl key! Yes, for some reason Toshiba believes we need two Alt keys but can get by with just one Ctrl key. I for one have a habit of hitting Ctrl-Enter or Ctrl-Home or Ctrl-End with just the right hand, and it drives me batty to simply not be able to. It’s one thing to have to find a usual key in a slightly different place. To have the key be nine inches from where you expect to find it is more than an all-day non-stop typist should have to put up with.

Luckily, most of the day I use a USB keyboard, attached to an Advanced Port Replicator. The port replicator is nice and small (the last Dell replicator I had was a giant platform for the laptop with an enormous back piece that seemed to take over my desk). It is difficult to get the laptop onto the replicator, though, because the symmetry of the replicator doesn’t line up with the symmetry of the laptop, if you know what I mean. The Thinkpad had a nice satisfying clunk of the two together, like a car door. The Toshiba feels more like two pieces of sheet metal being forced to fit. I figure I’ll get the hang of it eventually, but for now I approach the mating process delicately.

Overall, the Toshiba Tecra M3 seems to be a good workhorse portable desktop replacement. I use it for some heavy development (Django, MySQL, Eclipse, Firefox, Thunderbird, and VMware player all running at once), and it has not let me down.