Is a Toshiba Satellite( Toshiba Satellite C55-B5101 15.6-Inch Laptop PC -Intel Celeron Processor N2840 4GB Memory 500GB HD DVDRWCD-RW Webcam Windows 8.1 64-bit) a good Laptop?

Answer 1

In my professional experience, Toshiba laptops are not very reliable. Unless you are going to leave it sitting in one location most of the time (such as at home or at work as a space-saving replacement for a desktop computer), it would be best to buy another brand with my preference being Lenovo, Acer, or HP. Brands to avoid like the plague are Dell and Gateway.

Now about this specific model, problems I find with it are that it is underpowered by an older Celeron processor rather than something much more modern and serviceable such as a Core i3, the fact that it has Windows 8.1 due to its issues of incompatibility with a large number of peripherals and software packages, that it has only 4GB of DDR3-1333 RAM installed from the factory though the RAM can be upgraded to as much as 16GB if you wish to buy the RAM sticks to do so (4GB will squeak you by with Windows 7 but you really want no fewer than 6GB or, better yet, 8GB if you want to deal with the mistake version known as Windows 8), and that it has a low-grade 5400RPM hard drive (probably a Toshiba-brand drive since this is a Toshiba machine after all) instead of a higher-quality 7200RPM drive manufactured by Seagate.

Something that may make this seem attractive is the current price of about $250 for this machine. However, just like with everything, you get what you pay for. To meet that price, they have to cut various corners as I mentioned in the previous paragraph. What I would recommend you do is look to spend about another $150 to $200 and find something from one of the three preferred brands I mentioned that will do you much better. The best deals, however, for the price/performance curve will be at a yet slightly higher price point, around $500-600.