Toshiba Satellite C650-15X review

While many current budget laptops use processors from Intel’s Core i3 processor family, Toshiba’s Satellite C650-15x has a relatively underpowered Pentium Dual Core T4500 at its heart. Processing power isn’t the most important thing if you'll only be web browsing and word processing, but the C650’s weedy processor means that it needs to provide plenty of other features before it’s worth choosing over the competition.

It certainly looks smart. Its pitted black case is simple and attractive and has more in common with many of Toshiba’s business notebooks than a typical consumer laptop. It’s solidly built and very comfortable to work on, thanks largely to its curved wrist rest. We appreciated the keyboard’s wide, flat keys as well as the full number pad. The cursor keys are also well positioned and easy to use. The touchpad is good and we didn’t brush it by accident while typing, but we’d have appreciated a bit more space on the right-hand side of the wrist rest.

The 15.6in, 1,366x768 display is very glossy, which gives it a mirror finish if you’re looking at a dark image in a brightly lit room. Despite this, we liked the screen's clarity and accurate colour reproduction. Pale tones look dull and lose their accurate colour at lower brightness settings but the display looks great otherwise. The built-in speakers do their job adequately, but lack bass and are a tad tinny, so you won’t want to use them to listen to music too often.

If you want to connect better audio equipment, the usual pair of 3.5mm stereo in- and output ports is present. There are just two USB ports, which could be a problem for many users, and there’s a VGA output but no HDMI connection. The Ethernet port is only 10/100Mbit/s, but this is irrelevant for most people who will use the integrated 802.11n wireless adaptor. The memory card reader can handle SD, SDHC, SDXC and MMC cards.

Toshiba has been generous when it comes to some features; there's a 500GB hard disk and 4GB of memory, for instance. Battery life is very good at just over five hours. Predictably, there's not much by way of graphics processing power; the C650 couldn't run our test games at anything approaching playable framerates. Its overall score in application benchmarks was similarly unremarkably: 62 is about what we'd expect for a laptop of this price.

The C650's main advantage is its low price. For £439 it's a well-built laptop with lots of RAM and a hard disk with plenty of space. Despite its aging processor it's perfectly capable of all the tasks that most people actually use our computers for: email, creating the odd document, organising photos and browsing the web. If you're strapped for cash, the C650 is a good choice, but buy one swiftly as stocks are running low.