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my first laptop was a toshiba, they used to be one of the best laptop makers at some point

My first laptop was also a Toshiba but it was loud and plastickey and had some ACPI issue that meant power management didn’t work properly with Linux. For years I wished it was a Lenovo.

Spot on. Their laptops are so close to being great but there was always a little catch that made them just a hop and skip away from being all they could be.

They could be wonderful design but manufactured with some less than stellar materials. Things like that.

I will admit it lasted a long time and it was easy to service -- I upgraded it about 5 times over 5 years before I eventually got rid of it. Actually, I gave it to my dad and he used it for a further 3 or 4 more years. It probably still works ... who knows where it is today.

Around 3 years in I bought a new HP dv9700 on eBay and it failed within 6 months. HP declined to replace because it was from overseas. I ended up back on the "trusty Toshiba" which yeah I'll be honest it wasn't that bad for a cheap $1000 laptop.

Toshiba was really pushing the envelope in the laptop department in regards to how thin it can get, and on the other end how much hardware they can pack.

That came at the price of a lot of custom drivers that would rarely make it to the windows defaults, complete lack of backward (sometimes forward) compatibility, and abysmal linux support.

Same here.

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