Last year I purchased a Lenovo W530. Nightmares then ensued. Nice laptop if you just want to use it as a laptop, and only a laptop. Horror show if you need to present from it. So, I replaced it with an HP… which also gave me some troubles (try presenting with your laptop bricked in front of your boss AND 100 people), but that’s OK because I dropped it the next day (totally by accident, it had just worked great all day, I was happy with it, mostly). So there I was, laptop free and in need of something that would let me work, present, and be an all round road warrior. PLUS, I had just broke a laptop and was feeling bad that company would be replacing it. So I wanted to keep the costs down. After a lot of research, I decided to pull the trigger on the Toshiba Portege.

I couldn’t be happier.

This has been my best experience with a laptop since my Lenovo W520 (which just wore out from three years on the road). This thing is snappy fast to start up. It sleeps just fine. 16GB of RAM so I can run a couple of VMs (or one really fast VM). It’s got an SSD, so that’s it for quick I/O. The smaller footprint of the 13 inch monitor is great (and, I’m not at all bothered dealing with reduced screen real estate on the road). Heck, I’m typing this blog post on the thing right now. The battery life is awesome (I’ve been working in a hotel lounge for about four hours at this point and it’s still got another four hours to go. Oh, and the power brick is tiny so my overall weight when travelling has dropped.

Nothing is perfect. The touchpad tends to catch my palm and redirects where I’m typing sometimes. That is because I’m a little lazy with my hands sometimes while typing, so, to a degree that’s actually a plus, forcing me to watch dropping my hands. I think the keyboard is just a tad tight for my hands, but not too bad. I’m still not used to the function key locations.

But, I’ve been presenting all over the world with this thing on both VGA and HDMI connections. No issues. Ever. Of any kind. I’m in absolute love with it as a presentation machine. Oh, and did I mention it has both HDMI and VGA plugs, so no dongle in either direction. Three USB ports. It’s just great.

Screen quality and resolution is good enough for my tired old eyes. It’s also touch screen so I can scroll & zoom when reading stuff on it. I’m just happy with my laptop.

Now, if I can just keep from dropping it.

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