Unsatisfactory Toshiba

The computer on which I'm writing this is not bad, but oh, how it suffers by comparison.

It has the nerve to call itself a Toshiba Satellite.

The original Toshiba Satellites were a new concept and therefore had to be fabulous, to catch on--and they were. The one a grateful client gave me was worth one-day-a-week for more than two years. It was more than ten years old already. It had been "reconditioned," a word that often leads the way to "bargains" people soon regret. It had been around the world twice, and survived a plane crash. It had Windows 97.  I carried it around for another ten years and, apart from overheating once when the outside temperature was 103 degrees Fahrenheit, and getting borax in its floppy disk drive, it worked perfectly. It was crashproof. 

The Original, or Awesome, Toshiba Satellite could be connected to the Internet if you bought some extra cables and junk. So far as I know nobody ever did. Writing and accounting were still done mostly on paper, not entrusted to the hackable Internet--and among prudent people, anything of more consequence than a piece of ad copy or Bad Poetry still is not entrusted to the hackable Internet. 

The Original Toshiba Satellite was the size of a notebook, maybe a little over 9x12", but not a lot. Its keyboard was considerably smaller than a real typewriter's or desktop computer's keyboard. Hello? It was made in Japan, traditionally the home of small thin women with adorably tiny hands. Like some other Japanese imports, such as the Toyota Corolla my sister and I learned to drive, the Toshiba actually fitted me; I'm considerably smaller than that 150-pound man Americans think everything needs to fit. 

It sounds odd, considering that I was reading at age four, but I'm dyslexic in an unusual way. I hardly ever see things reversed, as typical dyslexics do, when I'm reading or scanning a field for objects. I often do things out of sequence: mix up numbers, blurt out the wrong words--not merely tactless words but words that may say the exact opposite of what I mean--and, especially, type out of sequence. Like all dyslexics I'm more likely to make dyslexic mistakes when ill or tired. Other things seem to influence the frequency of our mistakes in ways nobody has adequately explained. The frequency of my dyslexic typographical mistakes is affected by the proportions of the desk and keyboard. I realized this only when I started using the Original Toshiba Satellite laptop. I could type on it for hours without a mistake.

In addition to the size of the keyboard, the Original Toshiba Satellite's other big advantage, as far as my typing was concerned, was the size of the battery panel. Laptop computers have always had the battery panel at the front of the keyboard but it didn't always stick out four inches or more. The idea of having such wide battery panels was to help the average 150-pound man type with his wrists straight, his shoulders comfortably erect, and his elbows at a healthy 90-degree angle. Hello? Most of America's typists are not 150-pound men. When I have to type on a keyboard five inches away from the edge of the desk, carpal tunnel syndrome is the least of my worries. It may happen but it's not as immediately painful as the strain on my neck and shoulders from having to sit hunched and bunched like Richard Nixon. I've hated typing on every laptop I've ever used, except the Original Toshiba Satellite. That little thing was positively fun to use.

The Original Toshiba Satellite was of the 1980s, and, like all computers of that period, it had its quirks. Windows was a big improvement over the competing softwares because all Windows apps were compatible, but every version of Windows had a "bug" somewhere. On my Original Toshiba Laptop, the Home key never worked. If you had one, you had some other "bug." People worked around their computers' "bugs" and muttered that Bill Gates was deliberately building a "bug" into every computer so that people would want to buy new ones. Of course the new computers had their "bugs" too. You might as well keep the old one, especially after a year or so spent forming the habit of typing CTRL-Up, End, Right, to get to where the Home key was supposed to have put you. 

There is some debate among Windows users whether 97 or ME was the all-time peak of Wndows' functionality. Newer versions have added more apps at the expense of performance for the apps adults actually use: Word, Excel, Power Point, all of which worked much better in Windows 97, or possibly Windows ME. Show me a person who does not immediately agree that one of those two versions of Windows was the best, and I'll show you a person who learned to type later than 2005.

Some features of the Original Toshiba Satellite really have become obsolete, and rightly so. We used, children, to have to lug around suitcases full of floppy disks to store less information than can now be stored on a single "stick." To install or uninstall some apps, or use large databanks, we'd sit watching the computer read twenty floppy disks. The floppy disks had to be inserted and removed in order, and although the ability to preserve floppy disks in working condition was a source of pride for some of us, just being in a hot, cold, damp, or dry room destroyed them. CD's were an improvement. Stick drives were even more of an improvement. Cloud storage, of course, is the opposite of an improvement. My personal feeling is that cloud storage should be banned by the FCC.

Then there was the endearing way the operating manual for the Original Toshiba Satellite was stored on the hard drive, in a file, which displayed in a format meant to look just like a printed book. Can you imagine computers being designed so intelligently today? Hello, if you don't understand how to do something or why your computer is misbehaving, chances are that you're not connected to the Internet. All computers should still come with operating manuals stored on the hard drive.

   

I loved the Original Toshiba Satellite the way you love any working tool you notice as being more serviceable than the rest of its kind. If the company had continued supplying batteries and replacing the floppy drive, I'd be using it today. It wasn't perfect but it came close. 

This web site has actually been created on more than a dozen different laptops over the years. Most belonged to other people, so their quirks could be blamed partly on their owners. They dragged because their owners had installed Skype, the blood-pressure-raising app. They logged off the owner's account for one or two sites, logged on with your account, then sneakily opened some other web site still logged in on the owner's account. They had keys missing, or keys that stuck, or both. The worst was a "tablet" device shared by a co-worker. I don't know how anybody gets any use out of those silly little objects, and I don't even want to know why they try.

By way of consolation for not being able to keep the Original Toshiba Satellite going, the wonderful wizards at the repair shop offered a little Dell laptop, so old and worn that it would no longer run most of its original apps. I nicknamed it the Sickly Snail, for its very best operating speed. It seemed, like the snail in the poem, to be doing its very best. 

I did a lot, too, with Grandma Bonnie Peters' "good" laptop, a Hewlitt-Packard that had been "top of the line" when she'd bought it. It's an excellent laptop, as they go. Almost as efficient as a "real" computer, a desktop computer--and almost as heavy and awkward to carry around. 

Its motherboard burned out in 2020. It would have made a better story if GBP's computer had crashed on the day she died, but actually the computer "died" ten weeks before the human did. The computer has since been brought back to life in this world.

At the time the HP died, used laptops had suddenly become hard to find. A family friend's kid found one pathetic little old reject, the Dell Latitude; a friend paid for it so I could get back to work right away. I took the Latitude into the office, and within an hour or two it had its nickname. It was the Piece Of Garbage, or POG. It had Windows 10, which guarantees abundant annoyance; but it was also subject to what I came to call POG-fits, which were programmed into the wretched thing to force people to run their Latitudes on battery power so the company could claim the things saved energy. The minute the battery was fully charged, if the POG was still plugged into the wall, it crashed, usually losing at least half an hour's work. I don't think the company's intention, with that feature, had anything to do with being Green. Laptops are full of toxic chemicals that dissolve in water. It is not Green to build laptops that make anyone who uses them want to throw them into the lake.

I didn't expect the POG to last even two months, nor did I expect to miss it when it was gone. In fact it lasted two years and, though I can't say I miss the POG itself, it did manage to cost me several hours' work. 

I took the POG to the repair shop. If you investigate the reviews Yelp arranges in such prejudicial ways, you'll find that most people rave over Compuworld, a locally owned business on the far side of Kingsport. Only one person posted a bad review, and that was the person who took in a computer that was not HP. The wonderful wizards of Compuworld have a contract with HP; they have training and have access to replacement parts for HP's. They will do what they can for other computers, because they are nice guys, but you know...you don't expect the Ford mechanic to have the right part to fix a Chevy, you don't consult the chiropractor about a broken tooth...Could the wizards revive the POG, I asked. /They consulted, they tried a few things, and then someone else abandoned a recent-model Toshiba Satellite on their door. "We can't do anything for that Dell laptop, but look at THIS!" 

Well...

Appearance. Everyone's commented on how sleek and sharp and snazzy the Unsatisfactory Toshiba looks. 

Size. Much bigger than a notebook. Positively clunky. Who ever wanted a laptop to be 10x15"? Will not fit into any bag or case. Will not fit into the space allocated to it on my desk. 

Display. Fantastic. High resolution, clear lifelike colors. At least some of its multiple browsers handle PDF documents as smoothly as Word documents and make them almost as easy to read as real books.

Sound. When the Original Toshiba Satellite was built, computers' sound systems were good, mainly, for beeping when you typed in a word that looked like a mistake. The Unsatisfactory Toshiba Satellite has stereo speakers with better sound quality than most people's car radios have.

Keyboard. Are...you...serious? Well, it's secondhand; possibly the keyboard's worn out. Virtually unusable. All the keys, especially the space bar, stick. The keyboard is barricaded behind four inches of neck-killing battery case, and it doesn't even work. Trying to type on this laptop brings out the highest error rate I've ever had in my life. Typing accurate, client-pleasing documents...has to be done on the reliable desktop computer and transferred by stick drive.

Mouse. If I'd been consulted in the matter, computers wouldn't have mouse attachments. Anything done with a mouse could be done, usually more precisely, with the keyboard. Mouse attachments are the most fragile parts of a computer. Web designers should assume that all mouse attachments are broken--which is almost true. The Unsatisfactory Toshiba shares one truly detestable feature with the POG: a mouse pad" located right in front of the most commonly used keys on the keyboard, and made sensitive to light, so as you type the device treats the shadow of your hands like mouse clicks and inserts what you're typing into places where it does not belong. Additionally the mouse pad is built to assign three or four different functions to mouse clicks. This would be bad enough if the overburdened, hypervigilant mouse pad were divided into distinct sections that assigned different functions to mouse clicks, but it's not, noticeably, divided at all. You tap the mouse pad and the Unsatisfactory Toshiba decides which of three or four options it thinks you meant. More than half the time it guesses wrong.

Operating System. Detestable Windows 10.

Apps. The Unsatisfactory Toshiba reserves hard disk space for popular appds, including Word, but what it actually has is a set of cheap imitations of Windows' popular apps. The cheap "Open Office" substitutes for Windows on the Sickly Snail worked well. The ones on the Unsatisfactory Toshiba are dysfunctional. 

Operating Speed. Fair...as distinct from excellent.

General Lake Magnetism. Low. But it's hard to picture the Unsatisfactory Toshiba being what anybody thought of rescuing from a plane crash. The effect may be due to the inevitable comparisons its brand invites to its fantastic namesake, but, by comparison, this so-called Toshiba Satellite seems shabby.