Jacek Pliszka's Toshiba Satellite 1005-S157 page

I do not have this notebook any more so I won't be able to answer any questions about it. I sold it and bought HP Pavilion ZE4101 KB instead. These were the reasons: lack of PS2 (for USB2 devices) and serial (for GPS) ports on Toshiba, built-in firewire on HP, very good deal for HP.

First look to my main page about notebooks

For Toshiba info click here

InstallationPreparing partitions

First boot from any Cd with fdisk on it. Can be Linux installtion CD (Ctrl-Alt-F2 before package selection in RH), can be Windows boot Cd (skip start with F8). Just delete /dev/hda1 (all data will be lost so if you have any - backup it first) and instead create a smaller one - of the size you want to spare for XP - with type vfat.

Installing XP

Toshiba is one of the totally cheating vendors. Not only they "recovery Cds" are not XP installation CDs but in addition they normally destroy partition table and create one huge partition occupying the whole drive. Complain to Toshiba about it, be angry. You can install without using the whole hard drive but it is tricky:
  1. Boot Windows "recovery" CD and do not agree! Cancel at the first sight.
  2. got to drive Q:
  3. format C:
  4. fdisk /mbr
  5. \bin\cenv.bat
  6. cd \base
  7. os.bat
However I was also very successful with just Q:, cd \base, os.bat. Here are other instructions Install Windows.

Linux installation

Not much to say here - simple and smooth. Everything but internal modem and APM (this is ACPI notebook, for battery applet see link at the top of this page) works for me. Requires Linux distro from May 2002 or newer. Reason: Intel 830 graphics drivers are included in XFree86 4.2.0 but performance is weak - slightly too slow for DVD and divx. Put 8Mb as memory size.

If you installed Linux first and then Windows destroyed your MBR this may help:

If dual boot does not work for you with grub - this is a hint from Sachin Vaidya: in /etc/grub.conf add unhide and makeactive lines:

unhide (hd0,0) 
rootnoverity (hd0,0) 
chainloader +1.
makeactive

General comments

>What I do not like about it? Well. looks like this comments are not about 1005-S157 only but also about a lot of other low-end notebooks from other manufacturers.

First: Toshiba cheats with Windows XP. They do not give installation CDs - just recovery CD which erases the whole drive and makes one big partition with Windows XP. If you have important data or another OS on the harddrive - you got a problem. Also Toshiba support is very Linux unfriendly - well my next notebook will be HP again.

What I hate in this notebook is lack of PS2 (I had to buy USB keyboard and mouse when my ps2 ones where quite new) and serial (goodby my GPS), lack of point stick and power supply socket in the back. Unfortunately it applies to all new cheap notebooks. Also I miss USB socket on the left (Toshiba has on the right). They could put one of the 2 from the back on the left side of the unit. On the right USB is behind pc card slots - very inconvenient as my wireless cards blocks me access to USB. The morons put speakers in front!

This is addition to the review I posted before. Problems:

  1. Windows 98 does not work with it
  2. BIOS is very primitive, for example there is no full screen 640x480 mode (same in other new notebooks)
  3. ~ key is in stupid place (TAB is small)
  4. FDD - CD swapping is inconvenient: the lock is under the unit so you have to lift it to swap devices.
  5. no point-stick - and I hate touchscreen.
Unfortunately there is not much choice - I checked all cheap (less than $1500) HP, Toshiba and Compaq models and they most of them are very similar and most of them share above problems.

Jacek Pliszka
Last modified: Sun Nov 10 17:47:05 PST 2002