As always, my impulses were lousy. First off, the positive: the Harmon-Kardon speakers are GREAT for a laptop. Not great for anything else, but they absolutely blow away the sound of any other laptop I've heard. Sadly, they are connected to a none-too-great Yamaha sound card instead of a Creative Labs Soundblaster product with EAX or strong audio accelleration.

That's the beginning of the bad. I soon found out that the MX440 is not a REAL GeForce4. It is in fact a "souped up" GeForce2 -- two generations old -- and the 32mb of video memory were quickly surpassed in the marketplace by 64mb laptop cards. Meanwhile the ATI Radeon mobility that I shunned has proven to be a champ.

Then there's the CPU issue. I didn't know until I read these reviews that there was a desktop CPU stuck in this thing, all I knew was that when the machine got hot, the performance PLUMMETTED. There are frequent sudden shutdowns, and games (only games, so perhaps the GeForce card is also a culprit -- I don't know because Toshiba tech support refused to help me) often won't run... they start to open, then minimize to the taskbar, teasing me with the audio while I can do nothing to get them to open back up from the taskbar. At those times, Task Manager shows that my CPU is running at 99% load.

I mentioned Tech Support -- there is none. I sent in a tech support request and two weeks later got a snide email from Toshiba stating that they can't reasonably be expected to test their product with every piece of software on the market, perhaps I should file a tech support request with the software maker. This ignored the fact that it happened with every game I ever tried to play on it.

In short, this was a waste of money, and it will take a lot to ever get me to try a Toshiba computer product again. My next laptop will be a Dell.