A recently received a long overdue hardware upgrade and am now using a Tecra M2 laptop. Nice box for the most part and fortunately Microsoft does provide us with a fairly beefy machine (1.8GHz, 2GB RAM, 7200RPM 60GB Hard Drive, nVidia 64MB VidCard).

However, the Toshiba engineers that came up with the design for peripheral attachment must have been smoking crack. The laptop has the two USB connections, the DVD drive, and the external video connection all on the same SIDE of the laptop! What were they thinking? You get your mouse plugged in and the external monitor hooked up and it is a total pain in the ass trying to get a DVD in or out. Grrrrr. Add to that my mouse is ancient and its USB connector is getting twitchy so any inadvertent pump ends up turning the mouse off and you have a configuration that will slowly drive me mad.

All in all it is not a bad machine. Very light though its construction seems a bit flimsy (though I have been told that Toshiba actually has a decent durability record). The screen is a bit smaller than what I had on my old Compaq N800c so that has taken a bit getting used to. In the old days the Microsoft field used to get a pretty good budget for hardware. Now-a-days it is adquate, but I feel jealous when I see quite of few of the Microsoft corporate evangelists using AlienWare laptops!!!