Toshiba Satellite T115-S1100 11.6-Inch LED TruBrite Black/Grey Laptop – 8 Hours 22 Minutes of Battery Life (Windows 7 Home Premium)
- 1.3GHz Intel Celeron 743 Processor, 2MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB
- 2GB (204-Pin) DDR3 SO-DIMM Reminiscence
- 250GB 5400RPM Serial ATA Hard Drive, 802.11b/g wireless LAN
- 11.6″ 16:9 LED-backlit Show (1366×768 resolution), Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500M
- Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit, *8 Hours 22 Minutes of Battery Life
The Satellite T115 is affordable, ultrathin laptops built for everyday life on the go. Toshiba’s thinnest and lightest Satellite models feature a power-well-organized processor, making them ideal for students or quick-moving pros who demand a travel-friendly laptop with long battery life. Even if sleek and light, the T115 delivers the performance you’d expect from a standard laptop-horsepower to handle the day’s tasks or evening’s entertainment, plus a fantastic communications package to keep you effectual, online and in touch. They also offer uncommon convenience, thanks to a suite of Toshiba “Smart” features, plus a comfort-driven, eco-focused design that includes a stunning Fusion End in Nova Red, White or Black.
Rating: 
(out of 9 reviews)
Satellite Notebooks review
Recently a Sony tx770p given to me had it’s hard drive die on me after 2 months of really getting used to by the laptop. I have had my eye out for a long time for a replacement for it that would be comparable: 11.x screen, 1366 x 768 screen res, light weight, brilliant battery life, brilliant trackpad, and a particular type of keyboard that is similar to “chicklet style” but slightly different. Well, I finally found a replacement in the person of the Toshiba T115-S1100. Essentially it is a more-than-standard powerful netbook style computer.
Pro’s:
1. Screen and size – LED backlit and “TruBright” … lovely, crisp and clear! And 1366 x 768 screen resolution to boot, which is the minimum screen resolution I find really usable when doing day to day things like browsing the internet and reading docs (both .pdf and word processing). It weighs roughly 3.5 lbs – nice and light on your shoulder as you carry it around!
2. Battery life – with everything turned off I have been able to get a small over 10 hours doing simple word processing or reading docs on this machine.
3. DDR3 RAM – the machine comes with a 2 gb chip in one slot, with another slot available to upgrade the reminiscence. It maxes out at 4 gb. The ddr3 makes a noticeable difference in netbook level machines in my opinion.
4. Windows 7 Home – that is, a full installation of the OS, giving you way more options than Windows 7 Starter. The OS is only the 32 bit version, but it works fine considering the physical specs of the machine proper.
5. Keyboard – I personally really like the keyboard “style” used on this machine – there is spacing in between the keys a ‘la “chicklet style”, but the part of the keys you really hit with your fingers are a teeny bit smaller than the bottom part of the keys, providing superfluous space and in general a sturdy feel when typing.
6. Trackpad – a pleasure to use. Responsive and just plain well made.
7. HDMI port – for those of you attracted in such things this is a plus!
8. Web Cam – a 2 mp camera, a bit more for those of you who would use this than can be found on your average note/netbooks.
9. Intel 4500 graphics card – right, not that fantastic, but still enough to use the hdmi port out and provide excellent battery life. Much more powerful than most offerings on netbooks in general.
10. ULV CPU – yes, it is single core and it is a Celeron (something many force associate with poor performance or “second rate”). But, the fact that it is an ULV means that not only is it excellent for battery life but it can really crank out a honest amount of speed. This cpu runs at 1.3 ghz, 800mhz FSB, and has 2 mb of cache on it. Combine that with the ddr3 ram and a sata hard drive and you get reasonably a nice bit of speed for a machine its size and price.
11. Hard drive size – you get 250gb, whereas most netbook style machines give you a 160gb. Nice!
Cons:
1. Fingerprint Magnet – Argh! This thing (like many of the black colored machines produced now) attracts fingerprints to the outside of the machine and all around the outside of the screen proper. Frustrating.
2. No bluetooth – would have been a nice superfluous feature to add in. One should note, even if, that built-in bluetooth is not an option on any of the Satellite T115 models available out there. It would be simple enough to get an external adapter even if if it were really needed.
3. Mouse buttons – the mouse buttons used are “rocker style”, that is, one button over the area that goes downwards on any side. I am not a fan of the rocker style buttons myself and find them hard to use. Fortunately I had an external wireless mouse already.
4. Audio card – I have read accounts of people who have found the audio card far too weak to send noise out through the laptop speakers, although the sound through the headphones is reasonably fine. For me this is not an issue as I use it only with headphones. A simple “fix” for this is austerely to uninstall the point drivers for the audio card and opt for the microsoft standard drivers instead – they are reported to be a huge improvement over carriage sounds out of the speakers directly.
Middle-of-the-Road:
1. Heat control – it can get moderately warm when doing somewhat intensive tasks, like surveillance video files, for example. Nothing terrible, but it is noticeable.
Seriously even if, it is not so terrible, I austerely prefer less indicator lights on a machine in general.
2. Wireless card – it is 802.11b/g rank only. This is kind of “for the par” on netbook style machines in general, but why not place in an N rank?
3. “Fusion” end in Nova Black – the external ticker tape on the machine proper – it does not really excite me, but on the other hand it did not turn me off to considering to hold the machine in general.
4. Indicator Lights – there are nine of them, and they are all on the front of the machine. If they were all active your machine would look like a small string of Christmas tree lights!
5. Standard port offerings – 3 usb 2.0 ports, mic/headphones jacks, sd card slot, vga out port, kensington lock, 10/100 ethernet.
6. USB sleep and charge – basically some software by which you can configure a certain device to draw a charge form the laptop while it is asleep. Not really something I can use or am attracted in, but perhaps some may find it useful.
7. Overall Build – the machine is honestly sturdy and the screen and keyboard do not flex much at all. Excellent build in general overall from a “home line” product.
8. No optical drive – any internal or external. Again, I had one of these already, so this was not much of an issue, but to make dvd recovery discs you will need one.
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Conclusion: Overall I must say that I am very satisfied with this small machine. It is an brilliant replacement for me, basically a “super-powered netbook”: that is, one that portability, connectivity and battery life of a netbook, yet has more options and “umph” than most offerings out there. For a small more cpu speed and wireless N you can pay $40 more or so and get the T115-S1105. For me, but, this machine more than does everything I would want it to do for its size and price.
Well in a HUGE surprise my lovely wife got me this laptop for Christmas. Honestly it is virtually perfect. If I was going to spec out a netbook/laptop this would have been it. The Low Voltage Celeron is fantastic for saving battery life. It is also sufficient to run Windows 7 Home Premium, surfing, doc prep, email, and remote access. I am now running Windows 7 on a monster Core i7 and this small machine can hold it’s own with the monster when doing the simple things mentioned above. I would not try and render video with it or anything that is processor intensive, but it is very sufficient at playing videos and photo edits. The LED screen is bright, clear and AMAZING.
The only things that are a bit troubling are: 1) Due to the shiny case all finger prints and smudge marks are noticeable. 2) While 2Gbs of reminiscence is excellent – for $50.00 I increased the reminiscence to 4gbs. The system can only use 3.3Gb of the 4GBs due to the 32bit operating system, but the superfluous reminiscence certainly helped. 3) Also for some reason my wireless network card intermittently stops working, but a quick reboot and that fixes that. I am high and mighty that it is a Windows driver and I am looking for an update.
I give this machine a 5 of 5 due to the fact that it does everything that it represents it does. If you are looking for a lightweight, low power, long battery life laptop/netbook, then I would highly recommend this computer.
This notebook really is reasonably a nice package. It has a decent size HD
and graphics reminiscence.
The major issues are the sound and built in camera.
The sound was at first nearly inaudible and only after repeated
tinkering, deletion and reinstallation of drivers may possibly we get a
decent amount of volume from the speakers. BUT the down firing
speakers at the BOTTOM of the notebook are still inadequate due to
their stupid placement. What was Toshiba thinking??
As for the built in camera-well it leaves much to be desired. In lower
light conditions the camera is essentially a waste of time-no way to fix the
problem. Much of the reason we bought this computer was for
portability-to use Skype on the road in for example a hotel room or
airport lounge – in anything other than daylight the camera won’t
capture or transmit any decent image. So so long as you carry an superfluous
camera such as Logitech, and external USB speakers, you can get
real functionality. Defeats the purpose of a computer with built in
speakers and camera!
One major bone of contention is the notion of making recovery discs-without a CD/DVD rom. How do you do this?? So we had to go back to the store to buy an external drive (after two in between trips to buy a camera and speakers)to do Toshiba’s bidding. May possibly not get anyone at Toshiba to clarify why we do not have ORIGINAL driver discs. We were told by online reps that most customers preferred to make their own recovery discs and that no one wanted original operating sytem software!!
Instead there is a lot of junk software that clutters up and slows the machine, which like other buyers we deleted to free up space and speed…
Otherwise a fantastic machine which fits in nicely between netbooks
(really rubbish given their atom processors and base level windows opearing system software)and a fullsize laptop. Hey Toshiba, make and sell a sheath that fits this computer- we spent
days/weeks, and more numerous visits to Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples to find
a shielding sheath to carry the machine in.
I got mine for fifty dollars less from a NorCal electronics discounter. I wanted to try one of the CULV powered “netbook class” computers to see if it can support Hulu. My Atom powered netbooks do fine on home-brew h.264 coded videos, but stumble on Hulu – I have to run Hulu at 360p inside a browser and be very precise about running other apps at the same time – even antivirus (running reminiscence resident) sometimes needs to be shut off.
On the Atom netbooks, Windows experience for processor calculations per second is typically 2.4. On my new Toshiba, it is 2.9. Not a huge increase, but the computer is noticeably zippier in a hard disk virus scan, downloading and installing programs, etc. I can run youtube dot com/html5 beta test videos full screen in 360p, something I cannot due on the netbooks. So overall this is quicker. I cannot run Hulu full screen even in standard rez satisfactorily even on this more powerful netbook.
I may have a weaker battery in my version – I only show an indicated 4.5 hours of battery life from the battery monitor, but I have the power settings adjusted to high performance with full screen brightness.
Oh yeah I should add that the processor and graphics are driving a higher rez screen than on Atom netbooks, but it is STILL zippier – on Atom netbooks I have with similar high rez graphics, the superfluous pixel driving takes a noticeable toll on their performance.
Overall this netbook gives a very satisfying level of performance and is certainly more powerful than an Atom netbook.
So your choice is to pay about $100 more than a barebones Atom with 1gb/160gb for this CULV (Celeron 743) powered “super” netbook with 11.6″ screen in higher rez with a larger keyboard and 2gb/250gb – or get the Atom because it weighs about a pound less, is smaller, and can have up to 4-6 hours more battery life high and mighty the more powerful 6 cell battery option.
If this is going to be your primary laptop, I’d go with the Toshiba. Austerely a better keyboard, better hard disk, prettier version of Win7, quicker processor.
But if you need an ultralight machine for frequent travel, I still recommend the Atom netbooks. But don’t upgrade them with reminiscence, larger harddrive, or you may as well just pay the small superfluous for this better spec’d Toshiba.
One caveat – if you can use an iPod Touch for light browsing needs on most trips, you force prefer this more robust CULV netbook instead of the lighter Atom netbooks.
BTW Toshiba but a horrendous number of its own accessory programs installed on my machine, which took be about an hour to uninstall. Machine was quicker after.
Keep in mind that neither this Tosh nor the typical netbook is going to provide an ideal Hulu experience, although with the stuck-up graphics in this machine (GMA 4500) it SHOULD be much better once Adobe cleans up its act with Flash 10.1 which is beta 2 right now (and only works in the beta version with Nvida graphics chips despite Adobes claims to the contrary). If Hulu would run on this significantly better than on an Atom, I wouldn’t even consider an Atom netbook.
My current favorite Atom netbooks, in order, are the HP Mini 210, the Asus 1001p, and the Acer a0532h which range from $300-350.
I was pleasantly surprised at how quick I got my order. I was a small concerned about the projected delivery date but was reassured by the consumer service representative that I would get the computer much sooner. I live overseas and the computer was delivered within one week. I will be glad to do business with them anytime in the prospect.