Anyone Have A Toshiba 420/520 Or Other Celeron M 420/520 Laptop?

[Gary Brown]

Hi,

There are some Toshiba 420 and 520 laptops dirt cheap
right now. This will mostly be used for playing MP3s, watching
streaming video off the internet, and programming with Visual
Studio 2005. It is a given the memory will be upgraded to 1G.
A desktop will still serve for most of my work. I just want to get
away from it now and then. (We live in the country and its just
gorgeous outside today.)

A salesman did a good job of convincing me not to buy one
(he wanted to sell a more expensive one, obviously). He
claimed that:

It could skip on mp3s (I listen mostly to 64Kb or less)

Streaming video might have the same problem

Vista and VS 2005 have problems (I looked it up and
and there are some avoidable problems)

Given that I spend much of the day in VS listening to MP3s
am I going to have a problem with this PC?

Thanks,
Gary

 

[Gary Brown]

There are some Toshiba 420 and 520 laptops dirt cheap

right now. This will mostly be used for playing MP3s, watching

I should have added some specs -

OS - Vista Home Basic
520 supports 64b
1.6GHz CPU
533MHz FSB
1MB L2 cache
512MB standard, 2GB max, will upgrade to 1GB

The salesman also claimed it might be difficult to find XP drivers
for this PC.

Thanks,
Gary

 

[Ken Maltby]

Hi,

There are some Toshiba 420 and 520 laptops dirt cheap
right now. This will mostly be used for playing MP3s, watching
streaming video off the internet, and programming with Visual
Studio 2005. It is a given the memory will be upgraded to 1G.
A desktop will still serve for most of my work. I just want to get
away from it now and then. (We live in the country and its just
gorgeous outside today.)

A salesman did a good job of convincing me not to buy one
(he wanted to sell a more expensive one, obviously). He
claimed that:

It could skip on mp3s (I listen mostly to 64Kb or less)

Streaming video might have the same problem

Vista and VS 2005 have problems (I looked it up and
and there are some avoidable problems)

Given that I spend much of the day in VS listening to MP3s
am I going to have a problem with this PC?

Thanks,
Gary

For $100 or less it would still do a lot of what you want,
but you should be thinking Linux or Win95/98 never Vista.
The upgrading and a battery will cost more than twice what
the bare laptop should cost you.

I've got a 420 around here some place, I even modified it
some. It was a good hard working laptop in it's day.

MP3's would not be a problem at all. The 420 is no were
near fast/powerful enough to run Visual Studio. ( I personally
feel that it's easier to program with pencil and paper, myself.)
Serving as a client for Streaming video would be a little iffy, in
my opinion.

Luck;
Ken

 

[kony]

Hi,

There are some Toshiba 420 and 520 laptops dirt cheap
right now. This will mostly be used for playing MP3s, watching
streaming video off the internet, and programming with Visual
Studio 2005. It is a given the memory will be upgraded to 1G.
A desktop will still serve for most of my work. I just want to get
away from it now and then. (We live in the country and its just
gorgeous outside today.)

A salesman did a good job of convincing me not to buy one
(he wanted to sell a more expensive one, obviously). He
claimed that:

It could skip on mp3s (I listen mostly to 64Kb or less)

There is no justification for that claim, it should play
MP3s fine. I would be suspicious of any and all claims
coming from this salesman, he either thinks you know
absolutely nothing or he knows absolutely nothing.

Streaming video might have the same problem

It could have problems playing high resolution video using
high compression codecs like H.264, due to the low-end
processor. The typical streaming video you'd find should
play fine.

Vista and VS 2005 have problems (I looked it up and
and there are some avoidable problems)

No idea about this, you're on your own there except that I
would recommend WinXP for a laptop, particularly a lower-end
laptop, and if you can buy it with XP installed instead of
Vista it might be better for you as you don't need a 2nd OS
license/expense nor the work to install XP (unless you
wanted to wipe out any OEM stuff for a cleaner installation
either way).

Given that I spend much of the day in VS listening to MP3s
am I going to have a problem with this PC?

It should do this as well as any other.

I should have added some specs -

OS - Vista Home Basic
520 supports 64b
1.6GHz CPU
533MHz FSB
1MB L2 cache
512MB standard, 2GB max, will upgrade to 1GB

I agree it will be good to upgrade to 1GB, that will make it
fairly usable with XP, a little light on memory still for
Vista but a good start.

The salesman also claimed it might be difficult to find XP drivers
for this PC.

Go to Toshiba's website and see what they have available.
There might be XP drivers and if so you might go ahead and
get those just in case they disappeared at some point in the
future. You might also be able to use drivers from another
manufacturer or the respective chipset manufacturers but
there is no guarantee you would find all of them (though it
is quite possible), and it would take a bit more time to do
so. If Toshiba did a good job of detailing the components,
and/or by looking at the files _in_ the driver packs they
offer, you might get a better idea of the chipsets each
supports and use that as an aide to Google searching for an
XP compatible driver (if it isn't offered on Toshiba's
website, or another site like http://www.driverguide.com )

 

[CBFalconer]

.... snip ...

For $100 or less it would still do a lot of what you want, but you
should be thinking Linux or Win95/98 never Vista. The upgrading
and a battery will cost more than twice what the bare laptop
should cost you.

100% agreement. Read the following URLs re Vista.

 

[Ken Maltby]

For $100 or less it would still do a lot of what you want,
but you should be thinking Linux or Win95/98 never Vista.
The upgrading and a battery will cost more than twice what
the bare laptop should cost you.

I've got a 420 around here some place, I even modified it
some. It was a good hard working laptop in it's day.

MP3's would not be a problem at all. The 420 is no were
near fast/powerful enough to run Visual Studio. ( I personally
feel that it's easier to program with pencil and paper, myself.)
Serving as a client for Streaming video would be a little iffy, in
my opinion.

Luck;
Ken

Turns out it was a 440 CDT Satellite Pro, that I have. Your
420, obviously isn't the Toshiba Satellite Pro 420, I was thinking
of. It ran on a 100MHz Pentium CPU, supported up to 40MB
of memory, (it came with 8MB).
http://www.jdr.com/PDF/tosh-420xx.pdf

Now that is somewhat different from the spec you just posted.
Your 420 should be able to run VS 2005 Standard with no
problem. Vista being a resource hog, and still having teething
pains, would not be my choice but you may want/need it for
your development work.

Luck;
Ken