I recently purchased the Satellite L300D-10Q as a present for someone, it was £350 from Comet and had pretty good specs. None of their laptops came with Windows XP so I had to settle for Vista instead, but I made sure it had Premium - which this came with. This is the first time for 5 years that I have bought a laptop, in fact any type of computer for that matter (I usually make my own computers). It was an eye opening experience...

This Toshiba laptop was not easy to get going. On starting the laptop it came up with some Toshiba GUI which I had to select the language and a couple of options, it then restarted. Each restart left the computer lifeless and nothing on the screen for several minutes, which did not inspire me with confidence, it was only that I have the patience to wait that I did. Then as it went through I had to wait several times while the computer sat there with a spinning icon. Eventually I got to setup a admin user account. Then it started to go into Windows Vista after a restart. But strangely it came up with a windows XP type interface and some command windows which were running Toshiba batch jobs. There was no message saying what was going on or that you had to wait and should not close the windows.

At this point it asked me to register with Toshiba. And I tried, but of course no internet connection has been setup yet. So it then gave me a no internet connection error and closed. Then I had two command windows, and both sat there for 5-10 minutes when I thought the active window much have problems so I clicked to close this window, the other window said Quit batch job, I said no of course, and the batch job continued. The operating system did eventually load. And for all this effort there was one sentence in the quick reference guide that said something like wait for the operating system to load up!!! And there was no other documentation relating to the operating system!

When the OS loaded there was no link on the desktop for registering with Toshiba... so I googled it and started filling in the details, almost finished then got an error message that I couldn't register in the US, it was a dot com address, doh. So I changed the url to co.uk, but that didn't work. So google again... But its a real struggle to find the warranty registration page for the UK! In the end it is several levels into the toshiba uk page - really hard to find, and then filling in the form was a nightmare, a couple of times the form got wiped, and everytime I tried to submit I kept getting error boxes appear, rather then highlighting of the missing info on the form, also the form did not render correctly, which made it quite difficult to fill out, I got there in the end....

The link for Toshiba warranty register is: http://computers2.toshiba.co.uk/toshiba/formsv3.nsf/warranty?openform&nav_btn=no

Then of course after installation I needed to install the Security software, which on installing complained that McAfee was installed (ahh, preinstalled software, ahh) so I uninstalled that and then put on the new security software.

All in all this required someone with computer experience, and someone with little computer experience or new computing would not have been able to do this without help, which I guess the premium rate phone line is there for....

Overall I would rate the computer 8/10 so far its speedy doing all the basics it was bought for; web browsing, word processing, email, etc. I would give the initial setup process 3/10. I am sure there is an opportunity here to create a computer that is ready to use when you take home...