Toshiba Satellite Pro C650-121 laptop review

The variety of Toshiba Satellite Pro laptops stretches from a tiddly 11.6-inch T110 that weighs a sylph-like 1.58kg, each of the way up to an enormous 17-inch L550 that comes in at 3kg. In the severe finish in the scale we have the a bit larger 17.3-inch L670 Pro. The position is the fact that Satellite Pros can be found in various sizes using a mix of AMD and Intel hardware, but the design codes provide you with no beneficial clue in regards to the dimension of the screen or the spec of the hardware that lies inside.

The Satellite Pro C650-121 that we are reviewing features a 15.6-inch display with 1366 x 768 resolution. It's powered by an Intel Core i3-330M dual core CPU that runs at 2.13GHz but which uses Hyper Threading to existing four virtual cores to the 64-bit Windows seven House Premium Edition Running Technique.

Toshiba supports the CPU with an Intel HM55 chipset and 4GB of DDR3-1066MHz RAM that are the two perfectly satisfactory. Points obtain a bit much more contentious when we look in the Intel GMA High definition graphics with 256MB memory, since the hardware is able to playing films through the tray-loading DVD generate or digital files in the 320GB Toshiba SATA difficult drive, but is rather hopeless for gamers. Toshiba has picked to make use of Atheros hardware for the 802.11b/g/n wireless and Gigabit LAN, presumably as a less costly option to Intel chippery, but we located they worked flawlessly well and delivered decent efficiency.

The combination from the specification along with the Satellite Pro title elevated our expectations so we suffered some thing of a dip when we unpacked the laptop through the box. At a distance the chassis looks like it may be carbon composite but as soon as you receive up near you can see it truly is in fact created of textured black plastic. Unfortunately the chassis appears rather less costly than its ?¨º540 price tag tag might recommend and also the surfaces of the lid and the deck throughout the keyboard act as magnets for greasy fingerprints.

The arrangement in the ports and connectors also leaves a thing to be preferred. The strength jack is on the right-hand aspect behind the DVD generate as well as the SD/MMC card reader is around the front, but the other connectors are all arranged about the left side. The assortment is instead basic and is made of a VGA output, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet along with a pair of jacks for the headset.

Several laptops activity an HDMI output and we quite like to see an ExpressCard slot for future expansion. We take into account two USB ports to get the absolute minimum which is appropriate and prefer to see 3 or 4 USB ports, however we are also unimpressed from the layout from the ports. It's our guess the mainboard inside of the Satellite Pro C650-121 has a basic development to save on the expense of materials and the result can be a laptop computer together with the minimum of functions. That said, the quality of the keyboard, mouse and display is typical but appropriate.

Toshiba has tried to boost the Pro nature with the Satellite by adding a handful of Toshiba utilities which includes the Toshiba Bulletin Board. The concept is the application checks for updates towards the drivers and software program and after that flashes you a message in a very equivalent manner to Windows Updates.

In practice the system doesn't operate specially well. We ended up faced with three alerts which integrated an update for Tempro (software program that permits you to good tune the overall performance of one's laptop), a BIOS update and a wireless network driver update. Every update worked properly plenty of but essential a manual download and installation and wasn't a approach we would recommend for your technically unschooled