great laptop, good speakers

Toshiba Satellite L655-S5158 15.6-Inch Laptop (Black)
I'm typing this just thinking about what I wanted to know before I bought so this will be very back and forth as I'm thinking. For the price this is a great laptop. This one is replacing and older desktop that is close to death so I'm not picky. I like the number keypad but if you don't like having that like some people then don't buy a laptop with the number pad so you can't complain. I can actually type without having to turn off the touch pad unlike other laptops I've used. The lock for the touch pad is below the space bar so it would be easy to turn off if you end up with problems typing. It's also great to have the multi touch touch pad to zoom in and out. I can find the delete, number lock and insert keys easily so that's good. The backup took about an hour and used 3 DVD disk to complete plus one disk for the system repair disk. It has a great screen for watching Hulu unless you are use to extremely large screens. The speakers are good for a laptop. Really do you expect much from laptop speakers? I turned up the volume on both the player and main volume control and could back up where multiple people could watch and hear. They are better than other laptop speakers I have used where you have to hover inches from the screen to
hear or use headphones. I'm happy with it. The web cam did well with Skype. It has a microphone which low end laptops don't always have. The blue light to tell you the web cam is on is a little bright but maybe that will help when in low light. Plus you'll know when you're on camera when it activates and blinds you for a couple of seconds. I'm having to get use to the windows 7 but already like the ease of sharing files with my wife's laptop. I haven't tested the battery life yet but everything I read said it has really long life if you use the correct settings with dimmer display and short time before sleep kicks in. I set mine to that when not plugged in but always awake when plugged in for when I use it to play videos. I'll see how the battery life does this weekend while out of town. I don't notice it getting hot. I don't hear much mechanical noise unless the fan to the left kicks on but that's not often. If you are use to a more expensive laptop you may say this is a loud laptop. There is extra software added but I think that's fairly usual and I don't see much extra crap to be removed. With a 20% discount this was the same price as some other's I was looking at (also at a discount) but it had a larger hard drive by 150GB and a GB more memory. The one thing I didn't read that I don't like is that the memory card slot only takes the SD style cards/adapters. My wife's much cheaper Acer has a multi card reader that will accept SD style and XD. We have Olympus cameras that use the XD cards. I can use an adapter or just upload to her laptop and transfer to mine so I'm not too upset over this. It probably is written somewhere in the specs but I just didn't see it. I hope this answers any questions you have. I used the laptop last night without the cord and the battery life is great. It ran for about 4 hours before I got the 10% warning. I also hadn't turned on the eco utility until the last 30 minutes which dims the screen by 1 level, turns off unimportant programs and resets the standby to about 2 minutes of unuse. I'm sure with that it would easily reach the 5 hour battery life that is in the specs. It does have a cool chart when using the eco utility that shows the amount of power being used at that moment. Normal use when I checked was around 20-25 watts and the eco utility on setting dropped it to 8-10 watts.