Toshiba's latest Tecra A8 and M7 notebooks breathe new life into its flagship business notebook platform.

They keep rolling. K/Ns will beat this all day long for the same price or less.

Except for the tablet pc which KN doesn't offer. Maybe in the future???

Am I the only one that has a problem with where Toshiba insists on placing the <del> key, the Windows keys, and the <~>/<`> key? They're in the WRONG place! Having the windows key way up there is a royal pain when I'm in Windows, and when I'm using Linux, the tilde location drives me insane.

It amazes me that no one ever mentions that in a review of Toshiba's machines. It indicates to me that the reviewers don't really spend that much time with the machines they report on - otherwise they'd get annoyed by these shortcomings.

You won't be buying another Toshiba any time real soon.

Actually a colleague let me borrow hers for a couple evenings, which was very fortunate. I now have removed Toshiba as a potential vendor for laptops for the organization where I work.

I was walking through Best Buy today, and noticed that they have put some of these keys back in the appropriate spots. However, the backslash/pipe key (which is widely used if you have to do any sort of admin work in Windows environments) is still in an infuriating position tucked under a corner of a strange enter key.

I mean, seriously. Go to a very large computer shop and look at ALL of the other laptops and even the desktop keyboards. They all have these keys laid out the same - except Toshiba.

I don't get that, and I don't get why the tech press doesn't ding them for it. Maybe touch-typists are actually becoming that rare now?