Status Update on Toshiba Portege M400 Tablet + Vista

It's been awhile since I've posted any updates on my Toshiba M400. Over the past year, my experience running Vista has improved greatly and I've been surprised with my efforts on extending the useful life of this machine. For the record, it's > 2 years old for me now which is starting to breaking records for me now - I normally can't go much more than a year without an upgrade. The bottom line is with things the way they are now - I'm quite happy with the machine and haven't really envied anything on the market.

• I'm running the latest 3.60 bios which is pretty stable now, having not been updated since it's release in July 2007. Although I can't get to page 3 in the bios settings  (it locks up when I do that) things are working quite well.
• I upgraded to 4Gb of Ram. A little over a year ago I looked into this and it was going to set me back $1500+. This past march, it only cost $100. This probably had the single biggest improvement on usability in Vista. I was surprised that going into vista's Computer properties screen - it actually showed 4gb - and yes, running under 32-bit. I could tell in Task Manager that I was only getting 3.25 - but I was still surprised. At some point a windows update came through and now it only shows, correctly, 3.24gb. The bottom line here though is that for $99 - nobody should hesitate - the pay back was huge in terms of responsiveness.
• I also upgraded the internal wifi from 802.11g to 802.11n. This installation is not much more difficult than replacing the Ram and involves removing the keyboard which is quite simple. The only tricky part is getting those bloody antennae wire's snapped onto the circuit board. This upgrade cost $40 for the intel 802.11n card and installed in less than 30 minutes. I also upgraded my home router in conjunction with this upgrade. The throughput improvement was huge. My signal strength also improved greatly. My home office is in the basement (where my router is) and when I'm not in there, our family room is 1 floor up and somewhat diagonal from the home office. There are 2 or 3 walls through a stairway and a floor between where I normally sit and the router so signal strength was always marginal. No problems now and speed is at least doubled.
• I had purchased 2 100gb sata drives (7200rpm) to replace the internal drive and to put in the HDD Adapter tray. This is great for running VPCs. I've just ordered a new 7200rpm 320gb drive since I was finding 100gb a bit tight. I was hoping that performance of SSD would have come along faster (and the price too) but I'll have to wait for that. New drive is still a week or two away.
• I had my two laptop batteries refurbished at Ink Jet Sales. They take your batteries - put in new cells, for $85 and a 1 week wait. I wouldn't say they are as good as when I first bought them, but they are pretty darn close. Compared to the $200 Toshiba wants for new ones, this was a good deal. I also purchased an external toshiba charger that can charge 2 batteries externally from the laptop.
• As you may have recalled, my CMOS battery had mysteriously died and my clock was never right. This happened around the upgrade to Vista so I was a bit suspicious. It's amazing how many bad things happen when your clock is a day or two old. Many servers won't let you connect to them, VPCs get all wonky, etc. It was really hard to find a replacement battery - and this being a US laptop, living in Canada - the warranty fix was going to take close to a week. I could never do without my laptop for that long. Yesterday however, a battery showed up and our trusty IT magician, Max, took apart the laptop and got it back together. The RTC battery is nestled under the motherboard so he literally had to take apart everything. The step-by-step instructions here were invaluable. It took him about an hour and all things went smooth. I wasn't 100% convinced it was the battery that was causing the clock issues - but 24 hours later and it seems to have been the fix that was required. A nice side effect is that this repair requires the LCD and the hinge to be disconnected. After reassembly - the hinge is now as tight and firm as it was the day I bought it. It had become a bit loose over the past couple of years.
• I picked up a new 28" monitor a few weeks ago for the home office and had not stopped to think if the M400 could drive the 1920 x 1200 resolution until I started unpacking it. I hadn't used an external monitor for over a year and the last time - I couldn't get it to drive the 1600x1200 resolution of the monitor I had at that time. A bios update fixed that - but I still couldn't run Vista with Aero Glass when both displays were active. Much to my surprise however is that it has no problems with the full 1920x1200 resolution with Aero Glass. I suspect that new graphics drivers from Intel + the left over ram between the 3.25gb used by Vista and the 4Gb available has something to do with that.

All in, I'm very content with this laptop these days. Performance is great and you can't beat the package size. I still have troubles finding a 12.1" laptop with 1400x1050 resolution these days. Heck, I have troubles finding this in 13 and 14 inch models as well.

I use just about all of the features of this machine on a day to day basis including the tablet functionality and I've fallen in back in love with this machine.

My only complaint - and it's my fault, is that the screen is quite scratched up and pitted these days. If somebody has a M400 with the 1400x1050 laptop that isn't working (but the screen is in good shape) I'd love to buy it off you. I know a lot of MS employees have (or had) this machine - so if any of you have one lying around and they want to get rid of it - drop me a note at bgervin@objectsharp.com.