Wet Dream - Toshiba Dynabook Qosmio F20/390LS1 PQF20390LS1

Lo and behold, I just bought my first notebook computer. Not to be confused with the others, this is the very first one that I've personally paid for with my own hard-earned money.

I never thought I'd see the day though. I'm personally a desktop person, and having used notebooks both at work and in the field, I have never really grown to like its limited set of features and overall "slowness" compared to my Athlon 64 gaming rig.

Well, release the dogs of war, but I have now SOLD my relatively new desktop pc (I won't rant about how great it was now) in favor of my new baby, the Toshiba Dynabook Qosmio F20/390LS1.

The Qosmio comes in 2 colors, black and white, I got myself the white one as most of my other stuff are already also in white, vain me. The specs are nothing at all to balk at, featuring an Intel Centrino set of Pentium M 1.6Ghz FSB533Mhz (yeah, kinda slow for this day and age), Nvidia 6200 128MB Turbo Cache (32MB dedicated, get to this later), 80GB 5400rpm Ultra-ATA100, Built-in TV Tuner, and the best of all, a pair of Harman/Kardon stereo SRS speakers.

The Nvidia 6200TC is listed as having 128MB of RAM, but this is either a marketing gimmik, or they don't know any better. The Nvidia 6200TC actually has only 32MB of dedicated video memory, the other 96MB is taken from the slower system RAM.

The speakers are great, very loud, and does indeed present a good virtual surround. However, even before the volume reaches half of its potential maximum, you will notice some breaking up in the music, somehow telling me that the tiny speakers (in general) are not yet up to the job.

The Qosmio is very large for a laptop. Not that heavy though, but certainly very thick. It even has some problem getting into my laptop bag, which I should say is already large enough in itself. Perhaps the Qosmio is not meant to be carried around that way.

Immediately after getting mine, I got a pair of Kingston CL4 1GB DDR2-4200 SODIMM RAMs and maxed out the system at 2GB. Also, I bought an antenna adpator for ¥1,800 since the Qosmio F20's basic package does not come with it.

The Qosmio runs hotter than most notebooks I've used. As I am typing this, the board temperature is listed at 60 degrees celsius and the CPU at 71 degrees, very hot indeed when my other notebook just runs at 42 degrees. I'm not sure of the cause though, but I do have APM on.

Overall, the Qosmio F20 390LS1 is not a bad buy at a list price of ¥140,000, I got mine for ¥110,000 though. However, I would've wanted the Qosmio G20 had the ¥390,395 list price not been a barrier.


Processor: Intel Pentium M 730 1.60GHz FSB533Mhz (L1 Cache 32KB/32KB, L2 Cache 2MB)
Board: Intel 915PM Express Chipset
Memory(MAX): 512MB DDR2-4200 (2GB)
HDD: 80GB 5400rpm Ultra-ATA100
Display: 15.4 WXGA TFT Clear SuperView 1280x800
Video controller: NVIDIA GeForce Go 6200 TurboCache 128MB
Sound: SoundMax AC97, Harman/Kardon virtual surround speakers
PC Card: TypeII x 1, built-in SD, Multi Media Card, xD Picture Card, Sony Memory Stick Pro card reader (shared slots)
IrDA: Present (also used for the remote control)
USB: 3 ports (2.0)
Firewire: 1 port
Modem: V.90/56kbps
LAN: 100Base-TX/10Base-T, Intel PRO/Wireless 2915ABG IEEE802.11 b/g Wireless LAN
Others: TV Tuner (NTSC, PAL)+Remote Control, DVD Super Multi Drive (DVD±R 8x, DVD-RAM 5x, DVD+R Dual Layer 2.4x, DVD+RW 4x, CD-R 24x, CD-RW 10x), external microphone port, headphone port, line in, S/P DIF, RGB, S-Video Out, TV Antenna In
Weight: Approximately 3.45kg (7.60lbs)
Battery life: ~3 hours, 100 hours on standby, 32 days on hibernation
Dimensions: 274(L) x 373(W) x 39.8(H) (thinnest) / 43.2mm (thickest)