Toshiba M400 upgrade woes

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I’ve been following Loren Heiney’s M400 purchase pretty closely because I have some customers that have been eyeing that Tablet PC. Loren purchased it the way that I had planned on purchasing it: minimum RAM and minimum hard drive, then buy those upgrades from another source to save money.

Unfortunately, it looks like Toshiba is making it very difficult for the consumer – you have to remove the darn keyboard to upgrade the memory. In addition, if you plan on purchasing the 100gb 7200 rpm from somewhere else, XP doesn’t come with built-in SATA drivers for the SATA harddrive, you’ll need a USB Floppy drive. To make matters a bit more complicated, Toshiba doesn’t ship recovery cd’s – you need to burn your own.

Loren’s recommendation:  don’t plan on doing any of the upgrades yourself. Order it speced out the way you want it and bit the bullet. That is very unfortunate because OEMs like Toshiba really like to rake consumers over coals when it comes to RAM.

Motion’s LS800 is the same way in regards to its memory upgrade. The memory is not designed to be a user servicable operation. Order it speced out the way you want it. Unfortunately that means you are going to pay a lot more money for the kind of machine you really want. I will give Motion this thumbs up, though – they ship with recovery cds.