Having purchased Toshiba Satellite laptops since 2000, they have been my goto budget-based laptop and they have lasted (have not had one break down on me yet, not like my other laptops that I have owned) even with a lot of use through business travels and more.
Here we are with the Toshiba Satellite C55t-C5239 15.6″ Laptop.
Aesthetically, this laptop looks fantastic with its brushed black exterior.
But aesthetics aside, I am hoping this laptop works well. The laptop is bundled with Windows 10 and Toshiba software and features a 1.6 GHz Pentium N3700 CPU, comes with 4GB of RAM and comes with a 750GB 5400 rpm Hard Drive. It has a 15.6-inch screen and uses mobile Intel HD graphics.
It has 2 USB 2.0 ports, 1 USB 3.0 port and HDMI port and 1 audio-out port. It comes with a DVD-SuperMulti drive.
It’s important to note that the main Windows 10 device that I have used is a Surface Pro 3.
I tested the laptop after installing Office 2013 and the laptop opened software just fine. Watched videos via VLC and also it’s included DVD software and it worked fine. But the only thing that drove me nuts was sometimes the onboard mouse would glitch and not work. Typically, I like to use a wireless mouse but it did drive me crazy when the mouse would work, then stopped working and then worked. It seemed as if it was lacking memory. Fortunately, because the laptop is touchscreen, I was able to just click on the screen and close things out, which is a plus.
I tested Cortan and she worked fine. The TruTalk microphone picked my voice up just perfectly with a noisy background, which was good to see.
As I was Skyping, I connected it to my HDTV to make sure HDMI worked and it worked flawlessly.
Did a long video session, watched a DVD on it and for the most part, the battery power held out for a good amount of hours before needing a recharge.
I had to test out STEAM to see if I can play a few games, definitely those that weren’t graphic or memory hogs. And STEAM and smaller games worked fine.
As for anti-virus, you get a free year’s worth of Mcafee which is cool. Toshiba has also been good with updates as well, testing to see if the battery on the laptop is defective per a recall that came out in January. The laptop I was using was not affected.
The next step was to add a family member and this took FOREVER. Not sure if that is how Windows 10 is or if it was the laptop but after creating a family member and then logging on with their account, it just hung with a black screen (while mouse pointer would work) for almost 30 minutes. No indication onscreen that it was being updated, but the hard drive light showing that something was working. But after nearly 30 minutes of waiting, the account created finally showed up (shortcuts appeared on the desktop).
But so far, I feel that for its price, it’s a very good deal and if you are in a market for a first laptop for your teen or a person just needing a laptop and is on a budget. This laptop gets you through work and while I wouldn’t do graphic design or high end video editing or music production on it, for regular MS Office work, online-based work or anything that doesn’t utilize too much memory, this laptop works perfectly.
But let’s say you want to do more with it. Then it’s important to note that if you plan to update the RAM of the laptop, it comes with one bank at 4GB. Max is 8GB, so you can purchase an 8GB DDR3-1600 (or DDR3-1866) SODIMM. You can also upgrade the SATA drive to a SATA SSD. For this laptop, I would put a priority on boosting the memory. Hard drive is slow at 5400rpm but I’ve always been a stickler on never using the main drive for my main work and doing it on a external (or more like an SSD drive on a SATA dock).
But if you really want to do high-end work, there are i7’s or i5’s or better AMD laptops out there that are probably best to save up for.
Overall, the Toshiba Satellite C55t-C5239 is a budget laptop that gives more bang for the buck. It’s a great beginner laptop for yourself or if you are a parent and want a beginner laptop for your child, you can’t go wrong with this (unless they want to play “Fallout 4” or some graphic and memory demanding video game).
It did exhibit a few glitches with the onboard mouse, but if you are using a wireless mouse with a USB receiver, you probably won’t be affected. And also, the monitor is touch screen, so that helps a lot.
It only has 4GB of RAM but upgrading to 8GB is not difficult, nor is difficult to upgrade to an SSD drive.
As a budget laptop, it’s definitely not perfect, but the Toshiba Satellite C55T-C5239 is one of the better budget laptops at $400 or less.
Recommended!
