Toshiba Satellite C55-B5356 15.6 inch Laptop Review

Toshiba Satellite C55-B5356 15.6 inch Laptop Review

Toshiba C50 Series C55-B5356
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Toshiba C55-B5356 is a mid-range 15.6 inch laptop as part of the Satellite C50 series with solid performance- speed and power of the Haswell Intel i5 processor and 8GB memory at a decent price. Checking emails, social media, home entertainment- movies, songs etc., all office tasks- spreadsheets, word documents and presentations, some casual gaming with low to medium settings and multitasking of various tasks are no trouble and it is rather easy to use- all good as long as you don’t expect a Macbook-like show-off material or a super gaming PC as its case is not made of aluminium but solid plastic.

Toshiba Satellite C55 comes with the ultra low voltage (Thermal Design Power of 15 watts) 4th generation dual core Intel i5-4210U processor (3MB cache) with a base speed of 1.7GHz that goes up to 2.7GHz with Intel Turbo Boost, 8GB DDR3L SDRAM at 1600MHz for superior multitasking (not user upgradable but very much adequate as it is), 1TB Serial ATA hard drive at 5400 rpm rotating speed and 64-bit Windows 8.1 operating system. The i5-4210U is capable of handling demanding multimedia and office tasks with the speed going up to 2.7GHz dynamically when the tasks require it, has the Passmark benchmark score of 3442 on the day of this review and the hyper threading feature lets two cores to handle up to four threads in parallel for better utilisation of the CPU.

15.6 inch diagonal widescreen HD TruBrite TFT display at 1366 x 768 pixel native resolution and 16:9 cinematic aspect ratio and Intel HD graphics 4400 with shared graphics that is 20-30% faster than Intel HD 4000 and that can be compared to the discrete Radeon HD7550M and that is suitable for streaming videos online, light gaming and some multimedia editing, so you can play Minecraft and Tomb Raider- high settings and smooth frame rates but not really games like Call of Duty Advanced Warfare fluently at higher settings (Assassin’s Creed IV at lower settings and 30 frames per second). It doesn’t have a Full HD screen that supports 1080p resolution but with a good quality HDMI cable you can connect to your HDTV and watch the FHD streamed content from the internet. HD webcam with a built-in microphone will let you do live chats on Skype or videoconference with colleagues comfortably.

Toshiba Satellite C55-B5356 15.6 inch Laptop Review
Toshiba C55-B5356 weighs 4.85 pounds (a little less than the average for 15.6 inch laptops) and it is portable enough as a 15” machine- will fit in backpacks easily. The 4-cell 45Wh lithium ion battery is not user replaceable and should give you up to 5-6 hours on average use (thanks to the ultra low voltage CPU). Keyboard is not backlit but has the 10-key numpad for comfy number crunching as well as a touchpad with separate left and right clicks (touchpad is criticised for being late to respond by one of the customers). Bluetooth is not supported by default (no antenna and all you need is a cheap USB dongle) but you’ll find a DVD SuperMulti drive supporting 11 formats, 802.11bgn wireless, 10/100Mbps Ethernet LAN with RJ-45 connectivity for wired internet access, 2 USB 2.0 ports and 1 USB 3.0 port for connecting peripherals, an HDMI port, a VGA port, an Audio port, a Media Card Reader that supports SD, SDXC, SDHC, microSD, miniSD and MMC formats and a Security cable lock slot.

Conclusion: Toshiba Satellite C55-B5356 doesn’t have a touchscreen to use with Windows 8 apps and it is not Full HD with IPS panel, it doesn’t have Bluetooth by default, the keyboard is not backlit and the hard drive runs at 5400rpm rotating speed but considering the price level, these are not really major cons: Even some modern Apple iMacs have 5400rpm hard drives, for Bluetooth all you need is a Bluetooth USB dongle that costs as low as a few dollars and FHD IPS display, backlit keyboard or touch display at this price level with other high specs this computer offers would be a bit of a luxury, not necessity. Hard drive has a capacity of 1TB and would be more than sufficient for most computer users (you need to upgrade to a Solid State Drive if you want speed), i5-4210U is a workhorse to handle even the demanding stuff as well as everyday tasks smoothly and 8GB memory is plenty for great deal of multitasking but if you are into playing the latest games at high resolutions and settings or advanced multimedia editing including 3D modelling and rendering, then you will need a computer with at least a medium level dedicated graphics card. There is some junkware you may want to get rid of and you’ll find the 30 day trials of Microsoft Office 365 and Norton Internet Security which u may want to replace with free Avast or AVG. Despite the small cons, this is a great laptop for its price from electronics giant Toshiba.

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