We are taking a look at one of the cheapest Laptops available at the moment, the Toshiba Satellite C55D-A5120 15.6-Inch Laptop. This Notebook is currently priced at just under 300 dollars, but you wouldn’t believe that by looking at its specifications. Read on further and see what this little Toshiba has to offer.

The Exterior

When you first look at this device your are hard pressed to believe this is such a low price Laptop. The top cover and the palm rest are finished in ribbed plastic. Compared to the Lenovo G510s we recently reviewed this doesn’t have the look and feel of a cheap device.

The Toshiba Satellite C55D-A5120 comes with a 15.6-Inch LED backlit display having the typical 1366×768 resolution available on most laptops of this size. The screen is surrounded by a black matte plastic border with the webcam centered above the screen and the Toshiba logo in gray on the bottom left corner.
On the inside we find the power button on the top right corner, surrounded by a chrome ring that makes it look a bit more stylish. Above the keyboard area we find a vented bar that hides the 2 built-in speakers. Underneath this bar we find the very elegant full sized keyboard with numerical pad, underneath which, off center we have the touchpad with slightly rounded upper corners. The position of the touchpad makes typing on this device very comfortable as you won’t accidentally touch it while typing like in the case some other notebooks. The Toshiba logo in the bottom left corner completes the otherwise simple design.
On the front edge of the Laptop we find the status LEDs and the card reader.
The only thing that gives away the fact that this is a low budget device is it’s overall thickness. Compared to other devices available these days this device retains the characteristics of much older laptops.

Connectivity

The Toshiba Satellite C55D-A5120 comes with all the goodies available on higher priced laptops.

On the right side of the notebook we find the VGA-port, Ethernet LAN-port, HDMI, one USB 2.0, one USB 3.0, Headphones and microphone ports.
On the left side we find the Kensington lock port, power adapter port, one USB 2.0 port, and the SuperMulti DVD drive. Also on the front edge it comes with a 6-in-1 memory card reader.
To this we also add 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN. The only thing missing is Bluetooth connectivity. This problem can be easily fixed with one of these compact adapters:

The Performance

The Performance of this budget Toshiba Satellite C55D-A5120 is surprisingly good. The AMD E2-3800 quad-core processor running at 1.3 Ghz has very similar performance to an Intel Core i3-2357M. This processor is very capable if all cores are being used simultaneously, like in the case of multitasking, but it may run slower on single threaded applications.
The integrated Radeon HD 8280 GPU that comes with this processor also performs almost as good as the Intel HD 4000, making this a very capable notebook. Older games and some of the newer ones should run on this device. It’s so capable it can even run Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 relatively smoothly.

To this we add 4GB of DDR3 RAM and a 500GB HDD. The RAM and Storage capacities are slightly above average for this budget and I think are enough for the capabilities of the processor. If you do want to do a lot of multitasking then I recommend either upgrading the RAM to 8GB or buying a slightly more powerful device.
It comes equipped with a Li-Ion 48Wh, 6-Cell Battery that should ensure up to 4 hours of mobility.