Toshiba Portege 3500 review
Bought this on eBay for around $400, probably came from a corporate end-of-lease. So far, used it for a month and another 3 months in Asia with no significant problems.
Came with 128mb of ram, which is really totally useless. I was able to find a 256 pc133 sodimm module lying around, so it now has 384mb of ram. I see one memory module that is accessible from the bottom of the computer, but the other one has eluded me. Searching the internet yields nothing so far, but the toshiba specs indicate that it can support a maximum of 1 gb of ram.
When I first got the laptop, there was a problem with the pen touchscreen. There were bands of dead zones where the pen seems to get no signals. No amount of calibrating the screen helped to solve the problem. Apparently, there are two possible sources of the problem… 1) the bios setting to “stretch” the display , and 2) the video driver. I think the only true solution was to upgrade the video driver using the one provided from Toshiba’s website.
[update on the touchscreen March 23, 2008] - the deadzone problem seems to have reappeared, and no amount of driver or bios futzing has fixed the problem. Searching the internet reveals that the only solution is to gently press and twist the screen - seems to work! I guess that’s why these were available on ebay!
Works with knoppix 5.1 using the network boot. I tried to write linux boot images onto compact flash cards, and booted them via the built-in compact flash port, but no luck. Neither did booting using the same compact flash cards inserted into a PCMCIA adapter.
One thing about the SD card slot. It doesn’t recognize cards 2 GB and over.
The “quick access” buttons on the screen seem are reprogrammable, except for one, which has a “key” symbol on it. Pressing it will activate the task manager, which is pointless. They went through the whole trouble of designing this button, and all it does is task manager? wtf?
The handwriting recognition was surprisingly accurate. What surprised me even more was that it seemed to do better with cursive writing than with printing. However, it does have problems with differentiating between 1 and lower case L.
Built-in wifi is quite good. If there’s a base station in the area with a strange SSID name - something with a foreign character set, it tends to confuse the wifi card. Connecting another wifi card to it solves the problem.
Overall - a great lightweight laptop. Great for travel.
May 24th, 2008 at 10:54
Hi there - I have the same problem with my friend’s Toshiba Portege 3500 - the left hand side of the screen doesn;t respond to the digitizer pen at all. This wouldn’t be so bad, but it’s a whole half inch, which makes it impossible to calbrate as u can’t click the centre of the crosses.
I updated drivers and such but no difference - does twisting the screen really work? Could you give some more details as to how to twist it exactly? I don’t want to go about twisting my friend’s screen without knowing what I should do first!
Thanks!
June 7th, 2008 at 17:35
Hi, I can only say from my experience that it works on my laptop… your results may differ. Your problem sounds pretty much exactly the same as mine.
The amount of “twisting” used was very minimal, and a lot of it might not be described as twisting, but rather squeezing the edges of the screen between your fingers. My guess is that the twisting/squeezing action restablishes the contacts for the touch pen sensors…
hope that helps and good luck
August 8th, 2008 at 09:31
I discovered that the second memory slot is hiding under the keyboard. Remove the plate at the top of the keyboard, under the screen. Just pry it up, and unscrew the keyboard. There is the memory chip.
–Jerry
August 19th, 2008 at 03:58
Jerry, thank you very much for that tip! I’ll try to post some pictures of the chip under the keyboard.