Toshiba Satellite L755-5244

The Toshiba Satellite L755-5244 ($529.99 list at Staples) is a run-of-the-mill laptop available at Staples that gives you plenty of basic capabilities but very few frills. Its standard-issue hardware and unremarkable battery life will get you through the day, but without the extra oomph you'll find in our Editors' Choice for low-priced laptops, the Lenovo IdeaPad V570-1066A9U (4 stars, $629.99 list). If you don't want to spend the extra $100, will work?just prepare yourself for it to do so with less speed and less power.

Design and Features
The L755-5244 sports an attractive but understated design on its cover: checked gray plastic with a faint diamond pattern. (Toshiba calls it "Matrix Graphite.") This stretches onto the inside of the laptop as well, though the bezel around the 15.6-inch, 1,366-by-768-resolution LED-backlit screen is solid black. (A webcam and microphone are integrated into the top center of the display bezel.) So is the keyboard, which comprises a collection of flat, squarish keys whose stiffness and lack of travel grant at best a passable typing experience. Particularly troublesome is the short space bar; at least there's a 10-key number pad, and a multitouch touch pad for all your mousing needs.

If you need a card reader, the L755-5244's is located on its center-front edge. You will also find an Ethernet jack, VGA and DVI ports (for exporting video respectively to a PC monitor or HDTV), USB 2.0 port, and headphone and microphone jacks on the left edge; and two more USB 2.0 ports and the DVD burner on the right. (Sorry, this laptop doesn't come with a USB 3.0 port.)

For the most part, the L755-5244 comes with basic components. The roomy 640GB hard drive is the exception here; the dual-core 2GHz Intel Pentium B940, 4GB of RAM, and integrated graphics are none too exciting. Also included is the expected 802.11n Wi-Fi, though. The laptop's weight of about 5.7 pounds might be slightly on the heavy side, but it's basically par for the course.

Toshiba has preinstalled the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system, as well as the company's own suite of system utilities, Microsoft Office Starter 2010, and a 30-day trial of Norton Internet Security 2011. The L755-5244 has earned the EPEAT Gold certification, and also comes with a one-year warranty.

Customers who buy this system from Staples can avail themselves of several services the retailer offers. This includes setting the new system up, data transfer from your old PC to your new one, software installation, and tech support and protection plans that range in price from $14.99 to $169.99.

Performance
Compared with other budget-range laptops, the L755-5244 is hardly a superlative performer. It needed 6 minutes and 3 seconds to apply a dozen filters to a large photograph using Adobe's Photoshop CS5 imaging software; the Lenovo IdeaPad V570-1066A9U was able to perform the same actions in only 4 minutes and 10 seconds. Likewise, Lenovo's system earned 2.60 on our CineBench R11.5 rendering test, but the Toshiba squeezed out only a 1.56. The Toshiba also took 2 minutes and 57 seconds to convert a video file using the Handbrake open-source utility, a task the Lenovo wrapped up in 2 minutes flat, and the Sony VAIO VPC-EH14FM/B completed in 2 minutes and 24 seconds. (We're unable to compare overall performance using our usual PCMark 7 test; the Toshiba could not finish running it.)

The L755-5244 isn't much better when it comes to 3D gaming. Its frame rates of 9.3 frames per second (fps) in Crysis and 13.8fps in Lost Planet 2 are well beneath the "unplayable" threshold of approximately 30fps. (To be fair, none of the other systems in this pricing class does appreciably better. The Lenovo earns the highest frame rate, 17fps on Lost Planet 2, but that's a hollow victory.)

Loaded with a 48Wh battery, the L755-5244 lasted an unexceptional amount of time off-plug: 4 hours and 9 minutes. The best result we've seen lately for a budget laptop is the HP Pavilion dv6-6013cl, which endured 5 minutes and 17 minutes without being plugged in.

Ideal only for people who are looking for a full-size laptop, but don't want to spend any more money than is absolutely necessary, the Toshiba Satellite L755-5244 is ultimately an okay machine?and nothing more than that. If you want a better system all around, go for the Lenovo IdeaPad V570-1066A9U. If longer battery life is what matters, the HP Pavilion dv6-6013cl fits the bill. If you don't care about those things and want to save money, the L755-5244 will do the trick. It just won't do much of anything else spectacular to go along with it.

BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS

COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Sony VAIO VPC-Z214GX with several other laptops side by side.

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