Now that I have returned to the UK and being in absence in the past nearly 4 months I decided to purchase a powerful laptop to start working on my projects including IntelliCommands. No more desktop for me, the last one almost made me go deaf.

It took me over a month of research to decide what laptop to buy for my budget. Unfortunately, I faced some problems with my choice that I wanted to share but I would like to make it clear that this is my own personal opinion only and I will be very honest about it.

You can find the full specs of Tecra A10-112 in here.

Since the Toshiba Tecra A10 series marketed as Toshiba's business line with performance and durability I started developing a taste for it. To show off the durability there is even a demonstration video where the laptop is dropped on a table from 77cm height and it survives the fall.

The Toshiba Tecra A10 series is very new in the UK and at the time of writing this post most suppliers don't even list them. As you can figure there weren't any reviews written by known writers such as trustedreviews.com at the time I purchased Tecra A10-112. Please don't except my review to be as good as trustedreviews' because I don't do this professionally.

The Toshiba A10-112 that I got had three technical issues;

1. The keyboard – Three of the keys were making very annoying click sound when they were pressed. Considering I have to use the keyboard on daily basis for very long period of time I couldn't tolerate the fault for more than 10 minutes.
2. Screen Leakage – The screen frame that holds the matte let light shines through on left and right side of the frame. I believe this is called Screen Leakage. Looking at my five years old Toshiba Satellite Pro that I'm using to write this review has no screen leakage what so ever.
3. The lid cover appeared to be loose – Every time I closed and opened the lid I could feel the lid's cover is moving in my hand. I'm not too sure if it was by design or yet another issue. It certainly didn't feel like the laptops that I used before.

Apart from the technical issues there are series of poor design decisions about Toshiba Tecra A10 series as well.

1. Keyboard – The keyboard of A10 series are spill-resistant and that's the only good thing about the keyboard. The keyboard was so small for a chassis that holds wide 15.4” screen. Comparing to other wide 15.4” laptops that I have seen probably Toshiba Tecra A10 has the smallest keyboard. I'm guessing that to cut corners Toshiba used Toshiba Tecra's M10 series keyboard that uses wide 14” screen on A10 series. The keyboard on my old Satellite Pro M10 which has non-wide screen is way bigger and more comfortable to use.
2. The screen – The viewing angel of Toshiba Tecra A10 is very poor as well. I spoke to Toshiba regarding this and they told me that the viewing angel was a design decision. Basically Toshiba decided to install a screen with virtually no viewing angel for a business line laptop because they though it was the right decision. Considering you would often invite colleagues around to show them something on your laptop I would say Toshiba demonstrated that they don't understand the business customer needs at all.
3. The build quality – Toshiba markets Tecra series as "High Quality" but seeing one in flesh I certainly wasn't impressed by the build quality. In fact the Toshiba A10 that I got had very poor build quality feel to it. Being boring in design is one thing but paying for something for almost £850.00 and it didn't feel solid is another thing.

The only good thing I can say about Toshiba Tecra A10-112 is that its screen supports a resolution of 1,680x1,050 and only comparing to my old Toshiba Satellite Pro M10 I can say it was much brighter and the colour quality was brilliant. I have to leave the screen quality to experts.

Just for your record, someone else also highlighted my very concerns about Toshiba A10 series on Toshiba's European forum too. Please remember at the time of writing this article Toshiba has only sold a handful of them in the UK and I guess in other regions.

I had to arrange the laptop to be returned the following day and I called Toshiba several times regarding the issues. Toshiba never expressed being sorry for the experience that I had with their product in fact they tried to make it appear that I wasn't happy with the laptop (personal preference) and I wanted to return it which is not true. I have arranged the laptop to be returned due to its technical faults and I'm also happy to return the laptop for its poor design and poor build quality.

The Reliability Refund

As a consumer of Tecra you are promised if your laptop breaks down within the warranty they would replace and refund your money. Due to Technical faults on my laptop I have returned the laptop but that didn't constitute as a breakdown therefore the Reliability Refund wasn't applied to my case. The Reliability Refund offer ends at the end of October.

My overall experience with Toshiba is very disappointing now and unlike the past I would not recommend them to friends and colleagues anymore. I would highly recommend to you to wait for expert reviews to be published on both Toshiba Tecra A10 and M10 before making a decision.

I'm stretching my budget to buy something else now. At the moment I'm considering HP Compaq EliteBook or IBM ThinkPad T400. Please feel free to post your comments on Toshiba's Tecra A10, M10, HP EliteBook, and IBM ThinkPad T400 series for the benefits of all.

I really enjoyed reading Chris's article and I recommend it to any software developer out there to read it. However, there are a couple of points that I like to touch on.

Dilbert Writes…

Today the Pointy Haired Boss says he follows the measure twice and cut once philosophy. Dilbert then wisely points out that in software it is really much cheaper and easier to just cut because the nature of development is not like construction or furniture making. In those traditional industries physical resources are the limiting factor in determining production costs. Labor, or time is not as expensive as natural resources, like lumber. Besides to measure in software is to debug and log.

China is moving their manufacturing to aboard for both shortages of labor and to reduce production cost. Who predicted that? We need to look at labor as physical natural resource too. Labor is a form of energy. If labors don’t produce baby labors sooner or later there isn’t enough “energy” to produce enough for all. When life becomes expensive people tend to bring less life (energy) to earth.

Software Development is actually exactly like construction and has borrowed many elements from construction methodologies.

Both labor and time are actually more expensive than natural resources. Imagine the chair a company bought for the developer to sit on to work. The chair was made from natural resources that Dilbert talked about, right? Let say the chair was $500USD and the hourly rate of the developer is $15USD.  Less than a week the labor cost will be higher than the cost of the chair.

Chris Writes…

In the world of software development time is the most valuable resource we have. So having seasoned and intelligent developers is the key to efficient projects.

Both time and skill (developers) are equally important. You also have contradicted Dilbert’s comment about time not being more expensive. In my opinion in the world of Software Development the done project is the most valuable resource any company can have.

Chris Writes…

I think the reality is we actually need to be fluent in all of the above, but so much more. We need to know enough networking, user experience concepts, PhotoShop (design tools) and other indirect technologies that it makes things very hard. I honestly do not know how a real software developer hopes to succeed in the near future without having a rich set of skills and experiences.

Can I ask who is going to pay for the time developers are going to spend to learn new technologies that only secure them jobs that they have to work hard for it? I can’t possibly think of any other industry that has the same trend. Imagine if the doctors have to practice on their families and friends to develop enough skills and experience to get a job. Now I know what Jack the Ripper was up to. The poor man was only trying to get a job at London’s Hospital :-)

I have a lot of respects for Bill Gates but when I read his recent interview with BBC that he said developers should also develop skills to communicate with the clients effectively made me really mad. I don’t even believe the developers should talk to the clients directly let alone to have the skills. This is not the job of the developers to talk to the clients directly within an organisation if so why then they are being called software developers? There are well defined job descriptions within a team that should do the communication with the clients.

What else do we need to know first aid, cooking, dancing, social skills, babysitting boss's kids, and how to play musical instruments at the Christmas party?

I’m sorry but those who have good I.T. skills put all their time in learning them, no time to do for anything else. We all know we need to have skills to be successful but to say something unjustified and not thought carefully would make it a trend as it is today.

Earlier today I submitted an insufficient article to CodeProject site (guilty as charged) that was deleted. To post the article I had to spend time to register first and then go through the article wizard to submit it.

I was then promptly emailed by the web master notifying me about my article removal. I accepted their decisions gracefully and replied back thanking them for notifying me.

Since I didn’t want to duplicate the article else where (my article, my call) I just left a brief summary (Introduction) and the link to my blog. I also apologized for redirecting the users to my blog instead. Submitting the hard drive serial number post to my blog was hard enough let alone I wanted to go through the whole process of reformatting everything again.

Seconds before my article was removed I visited my article’s page to see if there were any comments that I needed to reply. I was shocked by what I have discovered. I couldn’t believe I became a victim of CodeProject users myself.

None of the comments apart from one that I’ll explain were directly related to the subject of my article. Virtually every single user tried to hammer me for being lazy with my article and talking about ‘votes’ and what I should have done to increase my chances for collecting their votes, huh? I didn’t know CodeProject had gathered the best brains in I.T. community.

They don’t know it yet but they all have actually voted for me but for being lazy. I must have been on a bottle of JD or two while I was looking for a solution on google. This is totally out of character for a lazy person, don’t you say?

I have to admit I’m really confused right now because either me is trapped in another world or they are and if they are I know what world that is, virtual. Incidentally one of the users were MVP (allegedly) that replied in a fashion that only himself could read it, or was he on JD too? I’m sure he was rich and loaded with virtual points.

The other user commented something along “nothing new anyway”. His reply was almost at the bottom of someone else’s reply thread. Sorry mate! I must have missed your article on the same subject among the 55,000,000 hits I got when I searched for “hard drive serial number” on google the other day.

To train a new gang member (normally a kid who is hanging around more senior gang members) they would pick a victim and bash him until he is defenceless then ask the kid to have a go at the victim. Some how when I read his reply it reminded me of the gang movies I watched on the telly.

I’m sure I’ve been a visitor of the CodeProject site longer than the registered users who replied to my article so rudely. I’ve seen the same thing many times on CodeProject site where a developer’s article was picked on by the same type of users. In some cases they were really rude to the author that I felt so sorry for the chap. I hold CodeProject responsible for not kicking out such users.

Obviously I would never try to contribute to a community that encourages its users to collect virtual points and doesn’t screen its site properly again. I’ve been around long enough to know this kind of system is open to abuse.

The true lazy developers just submit questions to such community sites so that others rush to answer them first to pick up the points, then what?

I’ll blog about the side effect of the Developer Communities in the near future.

I’d like personally to thank the bad wolves because you would make the good guys look apart.

Once someone asked me what was the secret that you can work this hard?

Here it is... 

• Tie Up My Hands by Starsailor
• Poor Misguided Fool by Starsailor
• Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin
• Yellow by Coldplay
• The Scientist by Coldplay
• Such a rush by Coldplay
• Tijuana Lady by Gomez
• We Haven't Turned Around by Gomez
• When A Blind Man Cries by Deep Purple
• Soldier Of Fortune by Deep Purple
• Working Class Hero – Ozzy Osbourne
• Planet Caravan - Black Sabbath
• Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath
• Heaven And Hell - Black Sabbath
• One Of These Nights by Eagles
• Satisfied Mind by Jeff Buckley
• Time Flies - Vaya Con Dios
• So Cruel – U2
• Gotta Serve Somebody - Bob Dylon
• Giving Myself Away – Faithless
• Jack and Diane - John Cougar
• Every Strangers Eyes – Roger Waters
• Welcome to the machine – Pink Floyd

 That’s all to it folks, if you made it rich don’t forget me.