Other Than Apple, I Thought the Days of Proprietary Hardware Were Gone!

Was I ever wrong. Which only proves again, that no one knows everything, or reacts correctly to every situation.

I have spoken here before, about the Toshiba Satellite L25-S1192 notebook that I ‘inherited’ from a customer who did not want to mess with the machine, and the machine had enough wrong with it that he correctly decided that for  his purposes, the machine was a constructive total loss. It needed a battery, a hard drive, and my working to return all the software and drivers to the new hard drive, after replacement. By the way, the restore disc and the documentation for the machine was lost, as was the original carrying case for the machine.

For me, it was no big deal, as it has the original Windows XP Home sticker, so I took the Windows XP SP3 image I downloaded from TechNet, put it on the $15 hard drive bought from the friend of my son, and, at the time, purchased a 1GB DDR2-667 memory module from Corsair, and removed the 1 stick of PC2-4200 memory (256M) for a total of 1.25GB of memory. I purchased Corsair because it is great memory, and I was thinking that stepping up to faster memory was a good thing, as I was thinking I’d upgrade the processor, if a great deal came along.

All was fine, until I attempted to install the second 1GB stick of DDR2-667 memory. I again bought a Corsair module, identical, as the notebook supports dual channel configuration, and I wished to make it easy to take advantage of the speed.

Well, nothing was more of a surprise than when I booted the machine, after inserting the memory, making sure it was properly seated, and then seeing that only 896MB of memory was available. This meant that the 128MB video memory along with the main memory (shared memory architecture, as most inexpensive laptops use) along with the 896MB was totalling 1024MB, or 1GB. I tried a Crucial stick of the same speed, 1GB, with the same results.

Then I started to look around on the Toshiba website. It was not long before someone had experienced the same thing as I, but was getting no help from Toshiba. A helpful person on the site was quick to point out that his experience with Toshiba was long and varied (mine is not). He stated that Toshiba specs a certain type of Kingston memory for their laptops, and nothing else really works well, if at all. Apparently, I have only been extremely lucky that the Corsair was working and not giving me fits. As a matter of fact, several places that sell the recommended Kingston memory refer to it as the Kingston Toshiba proprietary memory.

It certainly would have been nice for Toshiba, in all the information found on the site, including the large PDF of the system specs, to mention that the only proper memory to use was going to be the stuff that costs twice what the good stuff from Corsair or Crucial costs.

Oh well, live and learn. As I was saying, my experience with Toshiba laptops is small, and this was a learning example. Fortunately, it was not too costly, or devastating.

By the way, the Toshiba website is also very unhelpful as far as getting anyone to return a call. I replaced the 60GB Toshiba drive I had purchased cheap, with a Samsung 160GB, and it worked. I knew it would, but with no idea of how the BIOS would treat the drive, I did not want to spend for a 320GB and have only 128GB recognized. Having only 32GB unrecognized is tolerable, having to use a dynamic overlay, or having over half the drive unusable, is not. You see, I have been waiting 3 weeks and counting for a simple reply to my request to a singularly non-helpful tech support person concerning my one question, ‘Does this model laptop have a BIOS that features 48bit LBA?’ Maybe I am a bit overly concerned, but it did seem to me that someone working for the laptop division of a large company like Toshiba could rip this one off in one or two seconds. I provided the fact that I had flashed to the latest BIOS revision, giving the date and the filename of the download from their website.

He was mystified, not knowing why I might ask.

and they wonder why I get mad as hell!

What planet have I been placed on anyway?

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