I refreshed the Toshiba laptop the day before yesterday. It was working fine but the Toshiba’s primary user was having problems with Facebook and some of its features and functions.

I explained that the Internet connection was fine and that it wasn’t directly due to a Windows 7 or NIC bug, but in order to prove the point, I did it anyway.. Sure enough, the issue was still there.

The refresh went quite well apart from the boring period with seemingly endless Toshiba ‘Configuring the system’ screens. Finally, I managed to get the main stuff back on, and then copied documents, favourites etc into the user public folders for later distribution to the regular folders within Windows. As anybody who has done this for family members will know, I had the usual ‘where is this, where is that’, but it was reported that the machine appeared to be smoother in general operation.

One interesting aspect was that all hardware drivers were upgraded from the originals. I really didn’t expect that, and thought that I would have to go hunting for the latest Realtek NIC stuff. All good, eh. 

And the Facebook game issue? Well, had the user updated Adobe Flash player when asked by the system, there would never have been an issue. Hey, I am not the user. When I access the Internet, I use IE 9. not Firefox or any of the other browsers, and I always update Java and Adobe Flash when in IE 9.

Anybody using Firefox can do the same but it isn’t going to be me. The Facebook games are written and optimized for Firefox, but that is not my fault..  

BTW, the Realtek RTL8191SE which caused issues for over two years (dropped connections mainly) has only dropped connection once since the installation of the latest drivers.

I like Toshibas. They feel like they are well out together. Memory and hard drive access is good from underneath, and the keyboard and NIC can be removed easily too.

This next bit applies to Toshiba and other laptop makes. Would it really be too much trouble to make removal and replacement of the fan and the power jack easy? Having to pay criminal amounts to a computer service dept for items which just plug onto the motherboard has always frustrating for what is essentially a very simple job.

The Toshiba fan requires that everything is stripped out of the case. It doesn’t have to be that way..