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Poor Toshiba Qosmio G45-AV690. A classic case of when bad things happen to good laptops.

Blu-ray wins the war, Toshiba folds its tent and in the aftermath is this pretty good laptop burdened with an HD DVD drive.

The Toshiba Qosimo G45-AV690 might be all dressed up with no place to go, but it’s still all dressed up, excellent for movies with a 17 inch display, a remote and an external TV tuner.

But it’s not cheap, and the recordable HD DVD drive is yesterday’s news, which adds to the price.

Will Toshiba slash prices on the Qosmio G45-AV690 to move them out?

It’s Toshiba’s best laptop, and there’s a lot to love, from new Intel Penryn processors to 3GB of RAM.

It even has a subwoofer with the Harman Kardon sound system.

Just too bad about that drive.

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Solid State Drives… they’re appearing in a growing number of laptop computers.

The new Lenovo X300 features an SSD.

And Dell is now offering 64GB SSD flash drives from Samsung on some models.

What are the benefits of an SSD? Solid State Drives are fast and rugged. They start quickly and applications launch quickly because there is no spin-up. SSDs typically deliver good reliability because of the lack of moving parts.

There is near random access because there isn’t a read/write head. This also means low read and latency times.

They are ideal for laptops lugged by road warriors, not only because they are rugged but because many solid state drives, particularly smaller ones, use less power and throw off less heat.

There is no whirring fan and little or no noise

The downside of an SSD is typically storage size. Capacity right now is on the low side, but expanding quickly.

Solid State Drives are also expensive. Right now the cost per GB is roughly $15, while a conventional mechanical hard drive is about one dollar per gig.

The write cycle for the solid state drive is typically limited, and there can be slow random write speeds.

And the SSD has its quirks. While it takes a good shot, it doesn’t react well to static, power surges and magnetic fields.

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