How are Toshiba Satellites?

[hansel]

The day after Thanksgiving, Best Buy will be selling Toshiba L25-S1194 for $380.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7454364&type=product&productCategoryId=cat15157&id=1125465390707

Is this worth waiting in line at 4 am? Is this a good quality computer? I plan on using this mostly for surfing the web, watching movies, listening to mp3's and some gaming.

[thefultonhow]

Toshiba is a good brand, and that particular laptop has solid specs. I especially like the 512 MB of RAM. The only thing is that if you're planning on using it on battery a lot, you should spring for a more expensive laptop with a Pentium-M. The Celeron-M offers similar performance levels to the Pentium-M, but lacks the power management circuitry that allows the Pentium-M to have such great battery life. If you're mostly going to be using the laptop on AC power, though, I'd say go for it.

EDIT: I saw that you'd like to use it for gaming -- don't get your hopes up too much, because it has integrated graphics that use the system RAM. I'd recommend getting at least a laptop with Radeon X300 dedicated graphics, and preferably GeForce 6600 or Radeon X600 graphics, if you really want to game.

[hansel]

What can you actually upgrade on a lap top? Is it possible to get a new video card later? Or even a new processor?

[thefultonhow]

You can get a new processor, although it will likely void your warranty, but it's impossible on most laptops to upgrade the video card.

[hansel]

Thanks for your help. I'll probably buy this just because it's so cheap. I'll keep the gaming to my desktop pc.

[thefultonhow]

Thanks for your help. I'll probably buy this just because it's so cheap. I'll keep the gaming to my desktop pc.

Sounds like a good idea to me. It's not the best laptop in the world, but at that price, it doesn't need to be. My brother got a Toshiba laptop with less RAM and worse graphics last Christmas for $600 after rebate.