J Tsuzuki wrote:
> Many Toshiba users apper to have troubles when they wish to use OS's 
> other than the one supplied by its Recovery Disk. The most troublesome 
> problem is that Toshiba refuses to provide display adapter drivers. The 
> fact is that Toshiba's integrated video chip is a customized product by 
> ATI technologies (Mobile Radeon 9000) and that ATI expressly states that 
> the drivers for it must be obtained from Toshiba. Toshiba incorporates 
> the drivers into the supplied Recovery Disk (an image copy) for Win XP 
> Home. Accordingly there is no way to obtain the display drivers for the 
> adapter built in the computer when one try to use it with an OS or even 
> with the same OS except the one contained in the Recovery Disk.
> 
> Some one posted to use XP's driver, but, as will be discovered, XP's 
> drivers will provides less than optimum resolution. Namely XP's drivers 
> offer a choice only between 800X600 and 1024X768 whereas the 
> ATI-customized drivers, supplied in the Recovery Disk, list 800X600, 
> 1024X768, and 1440X900 for selection. The last is in specutacular 
> contrast to the best resolution possible with the XP's native drivers. 
> Since we buy the machine and since we as a purchaser are entitled to use 
> the machine in any way we wish, it is my opinion that Toshiba's 
> unfriendly policy is against the customs of computer technology world 
> which has been built on the contribution from a vast number of 
> engineers, pro or amateur.
> 
> I myself purchased Toshiba Satellite P35 without realizing potential 
> problems when I try to use it with Win 2000 Pro. When I replaced it by 
> W2K, the resultant display was miserably poor. After prolonged effort to 
> locate the source of proper drivers, including repeated contacts with 
> Toshiba and ATI, I finally had to give up.
> My initial intention was to use the machine with Japanese version of 
> Win2K Pro. After having seen absolutely unacceptable display resolution 
> (and failure to locate proper drivers in places including Toshiba, 
> Microsoft and ATI), I thought WinXP would contain the proper drivers, 
> but result was as described above.
> (Incidentally, if someone tries to install Win2K, don't be surprised to 
> find the keyboard doesn't work making installation impossible. The way I 
> discovered after discussion with MS support was to use an external (USB) 
> keyboard.)
> 
> The final decision I made was to set up dual boot between the 
> Toshiba-supplied WinXP Home (English) and Win XP Pro (Japanese) so that 
> when I need the best resolution and other feature, I to English XP and 
> when language matters, I settle with Japanese XP. This decision 
> immediately encountered a problem. When I partitioned the HD and tried 
> to install WinXP Home with the Toshiba-supplied Recovery Disk, it 
> refused to load with an error message something like "can't find 
> tbios.drv". This situation did not change when I first installed WinXP 
> Pro Japanese in one of the partitions.
> After seeing someone's message posted last year, I tried the last 
> possible solution to this problem. Namely, I removed partitions and 
> installed Toshiba-supplied XP first (which forcefully occupies the 
> entire HD space). Then I resized the occupied space by reducing to about 
> one half of the HD size by the help of a partition manager (in my case 
> 7Tools Partition Manager). Although it took a few rebooting, the 
> installed XP managed to settle in the narroed housing. Next I installed 
> another XP, Japanese, into the remaining space. The existing XP was 
> immediately recognized and dual boot was automatically set up.
> 
> If you are a hacker-level technician, perhaps you can extract Toshiba's 
> video driver files (which are invisible in the supplied image CD) and 
> transfer them to the other XP so that you can enjoy high resolution 
> video there, even you can then eliminate the Toshiba XP to expand the 
> disk space, if you want. I myself don't know how to do it.
> 
> Toshiba Satellite P35 is a machine designed to take advantage of XP's 
> advanced feature to maximize entertaining programs on 17" screen without 
> much consideration of its business use. Most purchasers do not ever need 
> to replace the XP OS, not to mention multi boot. Nonetheless, some 
> people may want to use it in a different language or use it with another 
> OS like XP Pro or Win2K (Win2K is almost identical to XP, yet does not 
> require COA!) If you are one of them, my text given above should be 
> informative. I still believe that Toshiba should make available video 
> drivers to the purchaser. After all it is a small piece of software made 
> by ATI. I wonder if I bought a portable by another company like HP, 
> Dell, IBM, the situation might be different?
> 
> JT
> 

Ever considered cutting down your postings?

Way too many words here. On and on and on, blah, blah, blah. Keep it a 
bit more brief & people might read it fully.

As it is very few will IMO. Just my personal opinion though.

Echy

PS I own Toshiba's