It was a fine Thursday morning, and shortly after breakfast, my mother and I made our way to Tele Dynamics, which is located near Jaya Jusco Ipoh, to have my Toshiba laptop fixed. For your information, only the spacebar was not working; had it been some other unimportant key, I would not have cared less to have it fixed. Unfortunately, the only way to fix a broken keyboard is to have the whole set replaced, which would cost RM130, excluding the RM100 labour fee.
My mother also contemplated on having a computer for her own use. Our family once had an old desktop computer which I said was too old to serve any working purpose. Its operations were very slow and I had often complained that the house needs a new computer. Well, looks like my mother would not be buying a new computer for the house, but instead take my laptop for her own use after the repair work is done. She is still into the stock exchange so she will be relying on the computer and the Internet for updates.
Therefore, as she wants to take my laptop for her own use, she will definitely have to get a new laptop for me then! Initially, our visit to Tele Dynamics was not just to repair the keyboard, but to also purchase a new laptop there. We were surprised to learn that Tele Dynamics had relinquished its reseller status about a year or two ago and is now solely a distributor and service centre. They told us very politely that if we would like to get a Toshiba laptop, then we would have to visit resellers like Megamate, SNS, PC Depot, etc.
So, we made our way to PC Depot. We found only two models of Toshiba laptops, namely the Toshiba Satellite L510 and the Toshiba Satellite M500.

Toshiba L510

Toshiba M500 - 14-inch wide-screen monitor
I would want a laptop that would have a dedicated graphics card, be it by ATi Radeon or NVidia, so the Toshiba L510 was not an option for me. My attention shifted to the Toshiba M500.
My mother and I would go and purchase another Toshiba laptop simply because the laptop (a Toshiba Satellite L20) which I have been using all this while did not give me much problems. Nothing was damaged except for the spacebar, and it has been with me for four years now. Therefore, we were of the opinion that a Toshiba laptop is worth buying for its durability even though its specifications may not be as high as other brands of the same price.

Toshiba Satellite L20
However, when my mother went to the counter to enquire about the Toshiba M500 which I was interested to have, the salesperson were not at all gracious in his remarks and communication, and was not the least even polite. There was no doubt that we were dressed in a very simple and casual manner (a plain red T-shirt, brown pants and slippers; my mother was in a red blouse, jeans and shoes) but since the salesperson was not too keen about doing business, my mother did not say anything else and made for the exit, with me following behind her. Outside, my mother said, “What attitude! Even if I am keen to buy that laptop, I will still not buy it from him with that lack of business ethics. There are so many other resellers who are more keen to have business from me!”
So, we left PC Depot and made our way to lunch first. After lunch, I suggested that we should go to Yik Foong Complex as there are quite a number of laptop resellers there. However, judge our surprise to find that there were only two or three Toshiba resellers out of the eight to nine retailers there! One had the only Toshiba L510 left for sale, another had the only Toshiba M500 (display unit) for sale, and one more had only two Toshiba M300, which I was not interested at all.
We spoke to the salesperson who sold the only Toshiba M500 set. He was more polite, and I asked him to allow me to test out the laptop, a request which he readily granted. I found that the performance of the Toshiba M500 was not as good as I expected. Despite being on the Windows 7 platform, the system lags quite often. However, upon restarting the system, its performance improved somewhat, but still did not impress me much. I had earlier on tried out an Asus laptop – the salesperson told me that despite having a processor speed of just 1.3 GHz its performance is as good as one having the speed of 2.1 or 2.2 GHz. I was far from being impressed. The response was much slower than I expected, and the salesperson explained that this is because its response time is compensated by its longer battery life – up to 12 hours, as compared to other batteries which would last for only 2.5 to 3 hours. I was adamant that I want a laptop with good performance, not a long battery life.
As the Toshiba M500 was the best laptop that I could find so far among all the Toshiba models (I did not come across a single Qosmio or Tecra model), my mother tried to make a bargain, as the laptop which she would settle on was the display unit. After five minutes of bargaining, we could still come to no deal, so once again we left the complex empty-handed.
Quite exasperated, I told my mother that there was only one more place left to check for laptops, and that was Ipoh Parade. She said that we could go there and check the laptops there, if any, and if there wasn’t one laptop that I could set my eyes upon, then we would just go home. I said that if I had known that she intended to purchase a new laptop then I would have brought her to Plaza Low Yat when she went to Kuala Lumpur last week. She said jokingly that we could just purchase two train tickets to Kuala Lumpur, as the railway station is just five minutes from home.
In Ipoh Parade, the only retailer that I could think of which sells laptops is SenQ. However, as far as I could recall, they do not sell Toshiba laptops. I was right. They have Sony Vaio, Acer and HP (I think) laptops. Neither Acer nor HP was our choice after my friends have told me a lot of stories about their Acer and HP laptops. However, my mother had come across a Sony Vaio laptop in the advertisement and asked me about it. I said that Sony Vaio laptops are known to be quite costly in Malaysia, and would generally fetch a price of about RM4000 to RM7000, or even more!
But I was wrong! They had two models of the Sony Vaio – one of them was the same currently used by one of the engineers in PETRONAS Carigali Sdn. Bhd. (yes, JR, it is the same model as your laptop) and another was the Sony Vaio VGN-NW25GF laptop. My attention was caught by the fact that the design of the latter model was quite appealing to me, the specifications are very closely similar to the Toshiba M500, it comes with a pre-installed genuine Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit), and it costs RM2999! I tested out the laptop and found that its response is good and it is very quiet. There is no doubt that the difference in the price between a Toshiba M500 and a Sony Vaio VGN-NW25GF is a mere RM300 (Toshiba M500 – RM3299; Sony Vaio VGN-NW25GF – RM2999), but the specifications are similar and that difference will allow me to purchase an external hard disk!
Perhaps some may say that the Toshiba M500 comes with the biometric login features. Well, I do not need that, and a laptop which allows me to run simulations, play games, complete my assignments and projects, etc. is an excellent laptop for me. I would not need an Alienware laptop for such trivial activities. After all, I am not a “hardcore gamer”.
Therefore, I brought home a Sony Vaio VGN-NW25GF. And as I feel happier about getting a Sony Vaio instead of a Toshiba, I believe that I have definitely made the right choice. There is no doubt that a Toshiba laptop is quite well-known for its durability, but if I were to accord the same care, which I had given to my Toshiba laptop, to my new Sony Vaio laptop now, there is no reason why it should not last just as long, if not longer.

My new Sony Vaio laptop - 15.5-inch wide-screen monitor

The cover view of the laptop
It was so ironic that our search for a Toshiba laptop has ended with purchasing a Sony Vaio instead from SenQ. A similar scenario happened to my mother and I two years ago and we were shopping for a new digital camera. We had an Olympus or a Canon camera in mind, but we ended up purchasing a Panasonic Lumix FS3 camera in SenQ, too. You can read about our camera experience here.