Toshiba Satellite C55-C-175
At a little under £400, Toshiba’s new Satellite C55-C could be just the ticket for anyone that can’t spend much on a laptop. It has a clean, fuss-free design – especially in allwhite – and a recent Intel processor lets it run for half a working day.
As a budget design built to a price, it lacks quality in key areas, and Toshiba preloads software (such as web browser toolbars) to claw back revenue from its customers. Not the greatest of starts, then.
Design
The lightweight plastic chassis is in essence that used in other budget Toshibas, with this C55-C missing the token metal veneer found on some models’ lids. Available in black or white, our snow-white sample had a fetching pale green trim along all edges. Sadly this proved to be just protective packing tape.
The keyboard is serviceable, with shallow tiled keys and a numberpad. Real buttons on the trackpad are a boon, since some low-quality buttonless types can be tricky to operate, though they require some pressure to click, making long sessions less comfortable.
There’s a tray-load DVD writer to the left, plus ethernet, a power inlet and a USB 2.0 port. Poor layout means that it’s nearly impossible to press Eject without lifting the laptop. The opposite side features one USB 2.0 socket, one 3.0 port, HDMI and a slot for SDXC cards. For wireless communication there’s standard Bluetooth 4.0, plus basic single-stream 802.11ac Wi-Fi.
Inside is 4GB of memory and a 500GB hard disk. Don’t expect to upgrade these easily since there are no access doors, nor a removable battery. Any service work will require a workshop strip-down.
The usual casualty when it comes to budget laptops is screen quality and the C55-C is no exception. Its lousy low-resolution panel became unreadable when viewed more than a few degrees off axis. In our tests, contrast ratio was only 80:1 and colour coverage just 60 percent sRGB. Together with its poor colour accuracy of Delta E 10.0, the result is a milky, washed-out image with furry text.
These are the same figures we’ve seen for most recent budget laptops, including the Satellite L50D and the Asus X555LA (top of our budget laptops charts). If you want or need a better screen, it’s advisable to spend a couple of hundred pounds more and get an IPS screen. A good example is the new Dell Inspiron 15-5558 (see page 27).
Performance
Toshiba has fitted a recent Intel Core i5-5200U processor, leading to decent bench results of 2616 points in Geekbench 3. It scored 5201 points when using both Hyper Threaded cores. PCMark 8 results are around average for the price: 2298 in the conventional Home test and 2747 in the accelerated one.
Mind your detail settings and you may just run Windows action games. We recorded an average of 37fps (27fps minimum) in Tomb Raider, wound down to 720p and Low quality. Similarly Batman: Arkham City limped at 30fps at Low and 720p.
With its fixed 44Wh battery, the Satellite ran for five hours four minutes, which isn’t terrible but short by today’s standards.
Verdict
The Satellite C55-C includes a recent Haswell processor but elsewhere the budget cuts show, especially the poor screen. Upgrading is not feasible, so don’t expect to easily fix the limited memory or slow disk storage later.