Joe Blog's A Day In The Life Of Your Average Joe

Qosmio Review: Part 3a

This part has been split into 4 subsections (a,b,c,d) to cover the following topics:

Windows, Ubuntu Linux, HD DVD & Gaming, so that said, onto -

Performance: Windows Vista

For those of you who have used Windows Vista: The Windows Experience Index tells me that the laptop scores a respectable 4.6 rating.

I've noticed that occasionaly, the laptop will boot fine, I'll log in, and then it will take a good 3-4 minutes to load up everything before I can start using it. Other times it's <1 minute, but on average, I would say between 1-2 minutes.

Obviously this gets quite annoying. I don't even have many programs loading on startup, I turned off most of the Toshiba apps, I didn't need them. All that starts is Windows Live Messenger, AVG Anti-Virus, Daemon Tools Lite, and that's it (that I've added anyway). Having said that however, after the initial pain of waiting for it to load, it runs pretty quick, and is generally very snappy and responsive, even with Aero enabled

Overall I'm pretty impressed with the responsiveness on Windows, I've been running a Game (full screen, high settings - and I'm not saying what game yet) and minimised it to check some stuff on the net, and ended up writing a document in OpenOffice.org Writer, and there was no noticeable lack in performance.

1 Gripe I had however, is that the battery life is pretty average (verging on poor). Though I realise that the size and components in this laptop scream "my battery life is rubbish", and I expected this, it does have 1 issue:
The battery lasts around 1 hour 30 minutes - 2 hours 10 minutes with full screen brightness (it depends on the activities), which I find I have to have, because dimming the screen makes it very difficult to read.

That aside, I'm pretty pleased with the performance when running Windows Vista on the laptop.