Toshiba Satellite C55D-A-13U review

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If you're looking for a large-screen budget laptop for use at home, but can't stretch to £500 then the Toshiba Satellite C55D-A-13U may do the job for a highly competitive £399. (See: What's the best budget laptop?)

There's actually more than a dozen different models in the C55D range, with Toshiba hopping randomly between AMD and Intel processors both old and new. This particular model we tested hit its £399 price with an AMD A6-5200 running at 2.0 GHz, saving some budget for a plentiful 8 GB of memory and 1 TB hard drive.

That amount of memory and storage mean that the Satellite C55D should handle a range of applications, as well as providing plenty of storage for your music, photos and videos.

The AMD processor may be quad-cored but isn't particularly fast. Overall laptop responsiveness isn't helped by the sluggish hard drive either. This Toshiba could only manage a score of 1725 points when running the PCMark 7 benchtest. That's a low, slow score, even by the standards of budget laptops.

The Windows 8 ‘fast-start' option did allow it to resume into the main Start screen in just under 15 seconds, but there's another 5-10 seconds of cursor spinning before the laptop actually gets going, and we noticed pauses when launching applications. (See also: What's the best laptop?)

To be fair, the C55D could handle basic web browsing perfectly well once it got going – but you'd need a different laptop or to be very patient if you wanted to try photo- or video-editing.

Build quality is good, and a weight of 2.3 kg is fine for a 15-inch laptop. The chunky 65 Wh battery pack managed a very respectable 5.5 hours of streaming video, so it could keep you entertained on a long flight, or plugged into speakers at a barbeque. External speakers or headphones are advised though, as the tinny internal speakers buzz like a bumble-bee and are actually quite annoyings.

The 15.6-inch screen is something of a mixed bag. The 1366 x 768 resolution is acceptable at this price, and the screen – although annoyingly glossy and reflective in bright daylight – is bright enough to provide quite wide horizontal viewing angles. However, the vertical viewing angle is limited, and we needed to tilt it at just the right angle to get a viewable picture.

Specs

Toshiba Satellite C55D-A-13U: Specs

• Display size and type: 15.6-inch (1366 x 768, 100 ppi) gloss TN LCD
• Operating system: Windows 8.1 (64-bit)
• Processor: 2.0 GHz AMD A6-5200 (quad-core)
• Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 8400 (integrated)
• Storage: 1 TB, 5400 rpm
• Memory: 8 GB DDR3
• Ethernet: 10/100
• Optical drive: Super-Multi DVD
• Video out: HDMI 1.4, VGA
• Wi-Fi: 802.11b/g/n
• Bluetooth: Bluetooth 4.0
• Webcam: 0.9 Mp
• Audio in: built-in mic, line-in
• Audio out: 3.5mm line-out
• USB: 1 x USB 3.0, 2 x USB 2.0
• Other ports: Kensington lock slot
• Card slot: SDXC
• Trackpad: 85 x 60 mm, two-button, multi-touch
• Power adaptor: 65 W mains adaptor
• Battery: 48 Wh lithium-ion, removable
• Dimensions (wdh): 380 x 242 x 33.3 mm
• Weight: 2.30 kg