Laptop lifesavers….

In my night job I get asked a lot about downgrading new laptops to Windows 7.

I have just done my last one, not worth it anymore.

Thankfully, because I am smart, which just means I have been burned in the past, and learned my lessons, as soon as I get a new machine the very first thing I do is pull the hard disk and take a full image using Macrium Reflect.

If you do not do this, stop, do not pass go, do not go any further, do not do anything else.

I can’t stress that bit above in red enough.

The reason I can’t stress it enough is we have gone back to the bad old days of the winmodem, and there is an actual reason that Lenovo Thinkpad T series laptops start and £650, and Toshiba Satellite C50’s of the same size start at £325.

The reason is the components used in the Toshiba are UTTER shit, every possible corner is cut, and the fucking things are deployed with a bare bones (not even full spec) UEFI BIOS, not a proper one, and hidden partitions containing the Win8 install.

Make no mistake, pull the hard disk, wipe it and all partitions, reinstall it in the laptop, pop in a genuine MS Windows 8 install DVD, and you will have a brick that refuses to even see the fucking hard disk.

No, it’s not because the HD has Primary / Dynamic / GPT setup, you can create the fucking partitions manually ready for the install and it still won’t work.

That’s cos the Satellite comes with a disk with 5 partitions, 4 of them hidden from the user..

• 1 gig NTFS system drive, hidden
• 100 MB no name FAT32 LBA, hidden
• 128 MB <no name> NTFS, hidden
• 450 gig NTFS main partition visible to the user
• 10 gig NTFS recovery volume, hidden

Yes, the bitch is looking, via UEFI, at those two small hidden partitions, one FAT32 LBA and one NTFS, to even SEE the fucking hard disk.

Even OpenSUSE 13.1 won’t install to one of these bastards.

So at this point, unless you have that Macrium drive image, you are TOTALLY fucked, because the only install media is in that hidden recovery partition, there is no recovery DVD, even if there was, it’s the same as a Win 8 DVD, it won’t fucking work if those two small hidden partitions are missing or damaged.

The Toshiba website doesn’t provide you with any repair or recovery methods or downloads either….not *merely* a case of them being lazy, there is literally no way, they would have to provide a disk image and tell you to pull the disk, put it in a docking station, and blow the image to it, which is how they build the fucking things.

Now, while we are on the fucking subject…

Starting this little cunt for the first time, it sets up windows for the first start, choose your region etc, this is FROM THE FACTORY, and it takes a fucking HOUR PLUS to actually get the cunt to boot to the desktop.

Once it has gotten to the desktop, expect at least another 30 minutes of waiting, while you think it is frozen, for it to finishing the first run setup.

Then it starts in all it’s glory, and the first thing you do is right click on the desktop to sort out the display resolution and settings, because they are fucking awful, and then you realise the settings are right, it is just the cheapest and nastiest LCD screen you ever saw.

And on, and on, and on….

So lets see what our £350 buys us

And lets compare it to the bottom of the range T series stinkpad at £650