Toshiba Tecra series: Personal opinion page

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My opinion, tips for buying etc.

Nevertheless, there are a few things I don't like:

• You can only have the CD-ROM internal and the floppy external, not vice versa if you want to use both of them. Floppy internal alone works, of course.
• The Tecra 710CDT, 720CDT, and 730CDT comply with IrDA 1.0 only and are therefore limited to 115 Kbps via the infrared link.
• The TFT display on the laptop here has one broken transistor. Not fatal, but sometimes very annoying. If you buy one, have it demonstrated before buying. Make a black screen (for example, MS-DOS mode, `cls`) then search for any spots. Afterwards, make a white screen and do the same. Toshiba says that their specs to their TFT supplier say that up to 12 (!) transistors can be broken. An article in the 10/96 issue of the German computer magazine "c't" reports that for 640x480 displays, Toshiba will replace the laptop if 10 pixels are constantly lit or 10 can't be lit. For 800x600 displays, the numbers are 15 constantly lit or 12 never to be lit.
• Although Linux runs fine on the Toshiba Tecra laptops so far, keep in mind that Toshiba does not support Linux, i.e. it is useless to ask them questions about running Linux on their laptop, so you're doomed if you encounter a problem like I did with booting bzImage kernels and can't fix it yourself. Most of the internals of their chips and even the names seem to be "secrets", so I guess if it's a Toshiba home-grown chip you need a driver for, you're off disassembling Win95 drivers.

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