Review by Isaac E. Schwoch for Toshiba Qosmio X505-Q860 TruBrite 18.4-Inch Gaming Laptop (BlackRed)
Rating:
I purchased this laptop as a desktop replacement and I use it for gaming, watching movies, writing software, and basic Microsoft Office and web browsing tasks. Overall I am extremely pleased with it and would highly recommend it to others. Here’s the breakdown:

PROS:

- This is an extremely fast machine. It boots up in under a minute with Windows 7 and I have yet to notice the occasional lag with starting up programs that I experience with most Windows PC’s.

- Newer games like “Dragon Age: Origins” run extremely well on this machine with all of the graphics maxed out

- The screen on this computer is beautiful. The color quality and contrast are extremely good and there is a ton of screen real estate. Some people have complained that it isn’t full 1080p but I find that the 1680×945 resolution makes icons and text the perfect size for this size of screen.

- Multitasking works great with a dual-core processor (four virtual cores with hyperthreading) and 4GB of DDR3 RAM. I routinely have 12 Firefox tabs up while watching videos in iTunes and editing four or five MS Office documents. A lot of computers don’t like this but the Q860 handles it wonderfully.

- The battery life is over three hours, which is pretty good for such a behemoth.

CONS:

- This is an extremely heavy laptop and I wouldn’t recommend it for frequent business travel. That being said, I do use this laptop for grad school and haul it back and forth to class one day a week using a Toshiba 18″ gaming backpack and it isn’t terrible on my back. I would definitely recommend a backpack if you want to carry this thing around as a normal laptop shoulder bag would probably destroy your neck and shoulder.

- Both Toshiba and Amazon claim on their websites that this keyboard is backlit but unfortunately, it isn’t. Amazon customer service handled this issue extremely well after I reported it, so I can’t complain about this too much. All X505-series keyboards are compatible so you can probably pick up a backlit one off of eBay if that’s a big deal to you.

- There is a decent amount of junkware pre-installed on this system, although not nearly as much as on the last Dell computer I bought. It’s kind of annoying that Toshiba does this on a high-performance computer that will probably be purchased by people that don’t want or need it.

OVERALL:

- I did a large amount of research before buying this laptop and as of this moment, there isn’t a better value out there in gaming laptops than this. It lacks some of the higher-end features such as dual graphics cards, a 1080p display, and solid-state drives, but for the money you can’t do better than this. I am now selling both of my desktops and I plan on making this my sole computer.

Review by Jason for Toshiba Qosmio X505-Q860 TruBrite 18.4-Inch Gaming Laptop (BlackRed)
Rating:
Pros

-Size is AMAZING (could also be a con, due to lack of case selection available)

-Speed – The Core i5 430M (2.26) with Turbo Boost is nice, outperforms my Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4).

-RAM – 4GB DDR3 is expandable to 8GB.

-Graphics – The GeForce GTS 330M GDDR5 1GB is an excellent mobile video card.

Cons

-No restore discs shipped with the system.

-No back-lit keyboard

-No Bluetooth

-Screen is too reflective, very hard to sit on my shaded porch and see the screen.

-Touchpad seems a little choppy. But I use my A4Tech mouse 95% of the time anyway.

All non-issues to be honest, but some people might find these a problem

Other

-The glossy finish is a fingerprint magnet.

-The media keys are a little irritating, I just disabled them, no biggie.

-I did a LOT of research before I chose this. My next choice would have been an Alienware M17x, but this is a much better buy.

All in all, this is a magnificent system, Excellent cost to performance. You wont find a better gaming system at this price.

Review by Mark Horton for Toshiba Qosmio X505-Q860 TruBrite 18.4-Inch Gaming Laptop (BlackRed)
Rating:
I bought the X505-862 model from Costco because of the 2nd year warranty and the Concierge Service. It saved my tail on this purchase. There was an issue loading Office 2007 on the computer and I had to restore to out of box settings which was easy enough as they had a restore partition on the hard drive. Then the display started acting up. It gets red ‘hyphens’ all over the screen and locks up. You have to pull the battery out to stop it. Called Toshiba and got the “I don’t speak english very well and I’m reading off a menu” technician who really wasn’t interested in helping much. I think he had somewhere else to be.

Toshiba’s customer support is as bad as they say on the web. There are better computers out there but it’ll cost you a little more. It bums me out that I spent all the time transferring files to this one and getting software set up. Hopefully the Dell I ordered to replace this will be better.