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| black toshiba laptop |
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| black toshiba laptop |
Toshiba Satellite L515-S4925 14.0-Inch Laptop – Black/Grey Review from Dave. Great display, not so great battery, The Toshiba L515-S4925 is part of Toshiba’s main consumer line: the L500 series of laptops. This version is the thin-and-light entry. It’s a very good laptop for someone who values good video quality (where this model excels) above battery life (where it lags behind).
A good friend bought this model and had me come over to uninstall the junk software (it was no worse than the typical bloatware found on retail notebook computers) and get it setup on his home network. Overall I liked this model but it has rather strong pluses and minuses. This is a pretty competitive market segment and I think Toshiba took a risk that will appeal to the right buyer: cut back on some less valued features and deliver a very high quality display. It’s aimed pretty squarely and HP’s very popular DV4 line of 14″ laptops and I think it competes well on most levels and (on Amazon at least) is priced about $150 less (depending on the exact DV4 model you compare it against).
Here a quick break down of the features:
CPU: Intel Pentium T4200 2.1 GHz (my friend’s came with the T4300 which is just slightly better). This is a decent dual core CPU for home use and it’s pretty typical for laptops in this price range. It’s not for anyone serious about gaming but it will run typical home apps and “light” games with no troubles. Two cores mean your system won’t slow to a crawl just because your anti-virus kicks in. While not as powerful at the Core2 line it’s still a good CPU for home users.
RAM: 4 GB 800 MHz RAM. This is becoming the new norm and it’s nice because this is lot of memory and provide some future proofing. This is plenty for home use.
HDD: 320 GB 5200 RPM. This is more than most home users will need (few exceed 100GB) and the speed is what I recommend for home users because it has a much lower failure rate than faster drives (and it’s plenty fast enough for home use).
Graphics chip: Intel 4500HD. This is also pretty typical of notebooks in this price range. It’s great for home use (including movie playback) and can run any non-3D game just fine. Older 3D games will run great too. Most new 3D games will run at dramatically reduced settings or not run at all.
Display: 14″ 1366×768 resolution (natively supports 720P video playback). This is a very nice display and I don’t know of any other laptop in this price range with a screen this nice. It’s is much better than the display you will get on the HP DV4-1433 which only comes in at 1280 x 800. It’s bright, has brilliant colors and good blacks. Toshiba clearly thought about the most important part of the laptop for most users and stepped it up a notch from the competition. Like most home systems it’s glossy which is great indoors but can be hard to read outdoors.
