Snagged an auction last night for a Toshiba Portege Z30-A for only $60. Has some i5 4xxx CPU, either 4GB or 8GB of RAM, and if my research is right either a 128GB or a 256GB mSATA SSD. Not too bad, for the specs of it. Only thing wrong with it is the SSD has a password on it, but I should be able to clear that pretty easily. If not, at worst I'll just have to finally pull apart my busted Surface Pro 2 and steal the one that's in there.
Will probably upgrade it to 8GB of RAM if need be and use it as my work laptop over the Asus U31SD I have now, which will be a nice improvement (only has an i3 2130m and a GT 520M, which even an HD 4400 beats out)
Well, got this on Tuesday and it's been kind of a shit experience so far lol. Specs of the thing weren't bad, had an i5 4300U, 8GB of RAM, and a 128GB mSATA SSD, which for $60 is a great deal. But it's got problems
First, the BIOS had a Supervisor password on it. Since it's Toshiba, who's apparently really good at securing their hardware, it's impossible to clear this BIOS password for the most part, cuz it's stored on the EEPROM with the BIOS and then on another chip as well (and there's no CMOS to clear, that I can see on the mobo anyways). It could probably be cleared by flashing a clean BIOS dump to the EEPROM, but I have neither the tools nor the BIOS dump to even flash it so that's dead.
Unfortunately, because of these things, I couldn't boot from the SSD (since the HDD/SSD password), and I couldn't boot directly via USB as the boot menu was disabled. So I pulled the 64GB mSATA SSD from my dead Surface Pro 2, plugged that in...and found that Legacy boot was enabled, so no UEFI, and USB booting was last in the boot priority, apparently, with Network boot enabled and in a higher priority. So it'd just keep resetting the network boot and wouldn't boot from USB at all when an SSD was plugged in. So I setup Serva, and was finally able to successfully install Windows 10 via network install, slapped another 4GB stick of DDR3 in it to bring it up to 12GB, and everything was all fine and peachy. It was pretty quick, thanks to the SSD, had excellent cooling despite it's teeny cooler (stayed a frosty 66C when running Cinebench, with 4 threads running at 2.6GHz stable), and was pretty quiet...
Until about 12 hours later, when it shat itself and now refuses to post
So, tl;dr, I ordered a replacement motherboard for this laptop series, which is identical hardware except for the CPU which is an i7 4600U, and (assuming the listing was correct) has no BIOS password.