Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277

Pros Great performance from fourth-gen Intel Core i7 processor and Nvidia graphics. Touch screen. DVD drive reads and burns to disc. A sizeable 1TB hard drive offers lots of storage capacity.

Cons Display is only 720p. Battery life is a little short. Bottom Line The Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277 offers category leading performance and a healthy feature set, but the ho-hum design and short battery life keep it from ranking higher.

By Brian Westover

Looking for a desktop replacement notebook for less than a grand? The Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277 has plenty to offer, like a 15.6-inch touch screen, a rich feature set, and superb performance thanks to a fourth-generation Intel Core i7-4700MQ procecssor and Nvidia GeForce GT 740M discrete GPU. It may not be the most portable laptop around, but for the user who is likely to keep close to home, the blend of performance and features make it a smart buy.

Design
The Toshiba Satellite S55t weds mostly plastic construction with a layer of brushed aluminum across the lid and palmrest, adding a luxurious note to an otherwise utilitarian design. The combination of plastic and aluminum is a little thick and bulky, measuring 1.2 by 15.2 by 9.9 inches (HWD) and weighing 5.3 pounds.

The 15.6-inch display is a bit plain with only 1366-by-768 resolution, but for a touch-capable system, we wouldn't expect more without a bump in price. The HP Spectre XT TouchSmart Ultrabook 15-4010nr, for example, offers a 1080p touch screen, but costs considerably more.

Just below the display is a speaker grill concealing two Harman/Kardon speakers. Paired with DTS Studio Sound, the overall sound quality is very good, with a wide volume range and clear sound even when turned up high. The bass was a little weaker than I'd like, but you'll still be able to enjoy a bass-heavy song. You can also tweak the sound to your liking with the DTS Sound Studio, which includes several audio optimization tools.

The Satellite S55t features a full-size chiclet keyboard and 10-key numeric pad, complete with LED backlight. Unlike the compact numeric pad seen on the Asus VivoBook V551LB-DB71T, the Toshiba keeps the same key shape and spacing as the rest of the keyboard, which should make things a bit more comfortable for anyone doing data entry or working in spreadsheets.

The accompanying clickpad has a plasticy surface, but it's responsive and the integrated right and left buttons didn't give us any trouble during testing. The touchpad also gestures like two-fingered scrolling and zoom, along with Windows 8 gestures, such as swiping in from the edges to access the Charms Bar or cycle through open apps.

Features
On the front edge of the laptop is an SD card slot. Two USB 3.0 ports are on the side, with a third USB 2.0 port featuring Sleep-and-Charge, letting you use it to power and charge your phone or media player even when the laptop is powered off. A LAN connection gives you wired Gigabit Ethernet, while the laptop is also equipped with 802.11n Wi-Fi.

A tray-loading optical drive (DVD+-RW dual-layer) is on one side, and features video upscaling to make standard definition content look better on the 720p screen or when connected to an HDTV through the HDMI output. A VGA output also lets you connect to a second monitor or projector.

Internally, the Satellite S55t is outfitted with a 1TB hard drive, offering copious space for all of your stuff, even a sizeable media collection. Toshiba regularly includes a number of preinstalled programs and apps on its systems, and the Satellite S55t is no exception, with more than a dozen proprietary and third-party apps already on the system at purchase, including regular Microsoft offerings, like Skype, Internet Explorer 10, and a 30-day trial of Office 365. There are additional 1-month trials of Norton Anti-Theft, Norton Internet Security, and Norton Online Backup. Toshiba also throws in its own app store (Toshiba AppPlace), ebook store (BookPlace), and some game extras from EA Games and WildTangent Games. Toshiba covers the Satellite S55t with a one-year limited warranty.

Performance
The Satellite S55t is equipped with a fourth-generation quad-core processor, the Intel Core i7-4700MQ (2.4GHz), paired with an impressive 12GB of RAM. The new CPU is a full generation ahead of the Ivy Bridge processors found in the HP Spectre XT TouchSmart and Dell Inspiron 15z (I15Z-4801SLV), and the extra ram will help keep performance feeling pretty speedy even after a few months, and you likely won't ever need to upgrade the RAM, though you could bump it up to 16GB.

The combination of a quad-core processor and 12GB of RAM produced solid results in our various tests. It finished PCMark 7 with 4,924 points, pulling ahead of the Asus VivoBook V551LB (3,176 points) and the HP Spectre XT TouchSmart (4,720 points). In the processor intensive Cinebench R11.5, it scored 5.84 points, a dramatic improvement over the likes of the Asus VivoBook V551LB-DB71T (2.92 points) and the Dell Inspiron 15z (2.89 points). That difference also translated into dramatically improved performance in Handbrake, finishing the video transcoding test in 39 seconds, while the Asus VivoBook V551LB-DB71T and the Dell Inspiron 15z both took more than a minute to complete the same task.

Performance was also boosted thanks to the inclusion of an Nvidia GeForce GT 740M graphics processor with 2GB of dedicated memory. Thanks to the extra processing hardware, the Satellite S55t completed 3DMark 11 with scores of 3,245 points (Entry) and 560 (Extreme). In our gaming tests, the Satellite S55t eked out 23 frames per second in both Heaven and Aliens vs. Predator, when set to low detail settings. As such, we can't recommend it for any sort of serious gaming, but you should be able to enjoy less demanding games like Team Fortress 2.

The graphics card includes Nvidia's Optimus automatic switching, which extends battery life by switching to Intel integrated graphics solution when the discrete GPU isn't needed. The upside is longer battery life, but you may need to manually switch back to the Nvidia card to get full performance while on battery power.

In our rundown test the Satellite S55t lasted 3 hours 41 minutes, which isn't terrible for a smaller 4-cell 43Wh battery, but you will need to bring along the AC adapter for anything more than a long lunch. In stark contrast, the Asus VivoBook V551LB-DB71T lasted a stunning 7:47, but it easily leads the category, which averages closer to 4 hours.

The Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277 may not be as portable as we'd like--it's a little bulky, and the battery life is on the shorter side--but the overall performance leads the competition, making it hard to ignore. The design is a bit drab, and the 720p display left us wanting more, but it does offer a decent set of features, making the Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277 worth a good look from anybody in the market for a desktop replacement.

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Toshiba Satellite C855D-S5104

Pros Low price. Great battery life. Nice textured finish.

Cons Sluggish performance. No USB 3.0. Stingy feature set. Smallish touchpad. Bottom Line The Toshiba Satellite C855D-S5104 is a budget-class 15-inch laptop offering sluggish performance and a stingy feature set, but it'll give you five plus hours of unplugged computing.

By John R. Delaney

The Toshiba Satellite C855D-S5104 is an incredibly low-priced 15-inch laptop that performs like an incredibly low-priced laptop. Its uses a dual-core AMD E-300 APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) that runs at 1.3GHz with an integrated Radeon HD 6310 graphics chip which combine to deliver somewhat dismal performance compared to their Intel counterparts. You don't get much in the way of features with this model, either. However, it will suffice for everyday home computing tasks and gives you over five hours of juice between charges.

Design and Features
At 5.5 pounds and 1.4 inches thick the Satellite C855D-S5104 is slightly heavier and just a hair thicker than the Dell Inspiron 15 (I15RV-6190 BLK). While not nearly as svelte as today's crop of ultrabooks, it is thin and light enough for short hauls. The Satellite C855D-S5104 sports a matte-black finish with a tight diamond textured pattern that extends to the keyboard deck. A Toshiba logo is positioned on the center of the lid and again on the bottom display bezel.

The 15.6-inch screen has a maximum resolution of 1,366-by-768 so you'll have to settle for 720p HD, but that's typical for a laptop in this price range. The screen has a glossy anti-glare coating that helps punch up colors but can be reflective when the screen is displaying a dark background. As with the Dell Inspiron 15 and HP 2000-2b19wm, the display does not support touch technology.

The traditional keyboard is full sized with large keys and a dedicated numeric keypad. It offers a bit of flex while typing but is not what I'd consider mushy or soft. As with most budget-class laptops, illuminated keys are not an option. At 3.4 by 1.9 inches, the Satellite's touchpad is smaller than what you'll find on most 15-inch laptops, but it is responsive. However, its diminutive size may make it difficult to perform gesture commands if you have large or pudgy fingers. The two mouse buttons are also a bit crowded and emit an audible click when pressed.

Port selection is limited, The Satellite C855D-S5104 comes with three USB ports but all of them use older (and slower) USB 2.0 technology. You won't find an HDMI port here, but there is a VGA video output as well as an Ethernet port and headphone and microphone jacks. The Dell Inspiron 15, in comparison, offers an HDMI port and two USB 3.0 ports.

Additional features include a tray-loading DVD multi-drive, a 6-in-1 card reader, and an embedded webcam. Wireless 802.11 n networking is built in but Bluetooth connectivity is lacking. The Satellite's 500GB hard drive comes with Windows 8 and a fair amount of third party apps from Netflix, eBay, Hulu Plus, Skype, Amazon, StumbleUpon, and others. Trial software includes Microsoft Office and Norton Internet Security. Toshiba covers the Satellite C855D-S5104 with a standard one-year warranty.

Performance
The Satellite C855D-S5104's 1.3GHz AMD E-300 processor and 4GB of system memory provided lackluster performance on our benchmark tests. Its PCMark 7 score of 1,343 lagged all of the Intel Core i3-based laptops by a wide margin, although it was a bit higher than the HP 2000 (1,087), which also uses the AMD E-300 CPU. Its Cinebench R11.5 CPU score of 0.44 was the lowest of the group, right behind the HP 2000 (0.45). The Core i3-powered Toshiba C875-S7340 led the pack with a score of 2.41 while the Dell Inspiron 15 managed a score of 1.44.

Multimedia performance was also unimpressive. The Satellite C855D-S5104 tool 24 minutes 13 seconds to complete our Photoshop CS6 task while the Dell Inspiron 15 took 9:04. The Core i3-equipped Toshiba C85-S7340 did it in 5:47. Similarly, the Satellite C855D-S5104 reviewed here took 8 minutes 18 seconds to complete our Handbrake video encoding test while the Inspiron 15 took 2:23. The other Core i3-equipped laptops completed the test in less than 2 minutes.

The Satellite C855D-S5104's AMD Radeon HD 6310 graphics solution is fine for playing video but it can't put up the frame rates necessary to play graphics-intensive games, as evidenced by its scores of 6 fps and 5fps on our medium quality Alien vs. Predators and Heaven gaming benchmarks. To be fair, the Dell Inspiron 15's scores were nearly identical, and the Toshiba C875-S7340, powered by Intel's HD Graphics 4000, managed only 12 fps.

The Satellite C855D-S5104 came up big in terms of battery life. It lasted 5 hours 2 minutes on our battery rundown test, beating the Dell Inspiron 15 by almost an hour and outlasting the older Toshiba C875-S7340 by more than two hours.

At $270, the Toshiba Satellite C855D-S5104 is a decent deal, but it's far from a great deal. Its AMD E-300 processor can't match the performance of similarly priced Intel-based laptops, and it comes up way short in terms of features. If you need a cheap laptop for Web browsing, emailing, and using Facebook, it will fit the bill, However, our Editors' Choice, the Dell Inspiron 15 (I15RV-6190BLK), offers better performance and more features for right around the same price.

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Toshiba Satellite P55-A5200

Pros Large 1080p screen. 750GB of storage space. DVD drive. Nice Price. Numeric keypad. HDMI and VGA. 1 Year Norton Internet Security/Anti Virus.

Cons No touch screen. No SSD/Flash storage. Less than four hours battery life. Almost five pounds. Some bloatware. Bottom Line The Toshiba Satellite P55-A5200 is a decent desktop replacement laptop that will keep regular PC users happy. It has the power to last more than the next few years, Windows 8 compatibility, and a huge non-touch screen for your media creation and appreciation.

By Joel Santo Domingo

The Toshiba Satellite P55-A5200 ($754.99 list) is a decent choice if you're looking for a desktop replacement notebook that will stay in one place, like on your home office desk, most of the time. It makes a few tradeoffs for its large 15.6-inch 1080p HD screen, namely somewhat short battery life and no touch screen. If you're a power user who wants to continue to use multimedia apps like Adobe's Creative Suite products, then this is a good laptop for you. Just bear in mind that this isn't the system you want to use as your primary transition to Windows 8.

Design and Features
The P55-A5200 is a traditional looking laptop. It has a silver finish, which Toshiba calls Prestige Silver, their term for a color that is neither bright silver nor dark silver. The system measures about 1.2 by 15.25 by 10 inches (HWD), and weighs in at 4.63 pounds, just short of five pounds. While that doesn't seem like a lot of weight, consider today's lighter ultrabooks and heavier tablets weigh half as much. The P55-A5200 has a built-in DVD burner and large 15.6-inch screen, both of which contribute to the system's bulk.

The relatively large size of the system can be beneficial: The 15.6 inch screen is the right size for its 1,920 by 1,080 resolution properties, since you won't have to worry about zooming in to the perfectly readable text and images on screen. The TruBrite TFT LCD display also works well for viewing 1080p HD videos, something that is common among laptops from manufacturers that are also known for their HDTV displays, like Sony, Samsung, and Vizio. Unfortunately, the display isn't a touch screen, negating many of the benefits of Windows 8, which is touch optimized. You can use the responsive multi-touch trackpad for all your pointing needs in Windows 8, but it is annoying having to call up the Charms bar and the like from the trackpad. In particular, the trackpad has a chromed plastic ring around it, which breaks the flow during off-trackpad moves. Systems like the Editors' Choice Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch ($700) and Asus VivoBook S500CA-DS51t ($679) have touch screens on systems in the same price range as the Toshiba.

The keyboard itself is a standard chiclet-style affair, backlit and with a decent feel. The P55-A5200 comes with a full numeric keypad to the right of the QWERTY keyboard, which will help students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) classes. The trackpad is centered on the QWERTY portion of the keyboard, which helps touch typing.

Like the budget Lenovo IdeaPad S405 ($549.99), the P55-A5200 uses a spinning hard drive. In this case, it's a 750GB 5,400rpm SATA drive, which is somewhat slow (especially compared to a system with SSD/Flash Storage). On the plus side, the drive has a lot of space for media files like downloaded music and movies. If you need more space, you can hook up an external hard drive to one of the two USB 3.0 ports on the right side of the laptop. The two USB 2.0 ports on the left are better suited to hooking up external mice and printers. Since the system is a full sized laptop, you'll find a pair of audio jacks, Ethernet, HDMI, and VGA connectors: All are full size without the need for adapters or dongles. WiFi is standard 2.4GHz 802.11 b/g/n with Bluetooth as well. The system is WiDi compatible, if you need yet another way to connect the system up to a monitor. The system has a SD card reader on the front, facing the user.

The system comes with a few pre-loaded apps, including Amazon, Wild Tangent Games, StumbleUpon, eBay, iHeartRadio, Vimeo, Skype, Toshiba Book Place, Netflix, Deals & Offers, Evernote Touch, Hulu Plus, Norton Internet Security (one-year subscription) News Place, an ad for Microsoft Office, and Origin (the game download service). Like most pre-loaded software, you'll need to budget a bit of time to uninstall the ones you don't want to use, unless you want all those program files cluttering up your hard drive. It's not the end of the world, but it is kind of annoying if you need to scroll several pages on the Windows 8 Start screen with a trackpad or mouse.

Performance
Thanks to the P55-A5200's Intel Core i5-3337U processor, 6GB of DDR3 memory, and Intel HD Graphics 4000, the system turns in decent performance numbers. It was better than average against the competition, quickly finishing the Handbrake video test in 1 minute 35 seconds, and the Photoshop CS6 test in 5:36. These scores lag the Lenovo Z400 Touch by a bit, but the P55-A5200 shows its mettle compared to lower-priced systems like the Lenovo IdeaPad S405.

The P55-A5200 showed itself to be a high performer among the hard drive-equipped systems, coming in with a 3,130 point score on PCMark7, which measures the systems' day-to-day performance. The thing is, systems with SSD/Flash storage regularly score in the 4,500- to 5,000-point range on the same test. Suffice to say that the P55-A5200 is adequate for the time being, but it will start to feel slower sooner than a system with SSD. Users are being trained by their mobile devices to expect instantaneous app loading and booting thanks to the prevalent use of flash storage and SSDs in the mobile space.

The P55-A5200's most disappointing stat is its three hour, forty-seven minute battery life. While this is decent for a user that has regular access to a power outlet, it is a lot less than the Acer Aspire M5-581T-6405 ($600), which clocks in at over six hours. True, the Acer M5-581T-6405 has a lower resolution screen, but time away from a plug is more important to you, then it is a better choice for the mobile PC user. To wit: The class-leading Lenovo Z400 Touch outlasted the P55-A5200 by over an hour.

With decent multimedia performance numbers and a large 1080p HD screen, the Toshiba Satellite P55-A5200 is a good value for users who need application performance over portability. The lack of a touch screen means that this probably shouldn't be your primary Windows 8 system, but if you're going to live in apps like Adobe Creative Suite or other non-touch apps, you should be fine. Under old guidelines the system meets thin and light characteristics, in today's terms the P55-A5200 is a desktop replacement laptop. In that case, the P55-A5200 just can't keep up with the similarly priced Editors' Choice Lenovo IdeaPad Z400 Touch on features and overall performance.

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