Toshiba Satellite C50-B

At a Glance

Expert’s Rating

Our Verdict

It’s not going to turn any heads, but the C50-B-IIL provides a perfectly usable laptop at a very competitive price. Its performance, screen quality and battery life match those of other budget laptops we’ve seen costing £400 – £500, making the C50 a good option for anyone that needs a reliable laptop for less than £400.

Best Prices Today: Toshiba Satellite C50-B-IIL

Prices for the C50 range start at just £229 for a model with a Celeron processor, but even this top-of-the-range C50-B-IIL comes in at just under £350 with an i3 processor running at 1.8GHz, 4GB memory and 750GB hard disk. That’s a decent specification for a laptop in this price range, even if the Ivy Bridge i3 doesn’t have a turboboost option to enhance performance. Its score of 2160 points in the general-purpose PCMark 7 isn’t bad at all for an i3 that is only backed-up by a 5400rpm hard drive. The Home and Work Suites in PCMark 8 also produced entry-level scores of 1883 and 2240 points respectively. But, to be fair, we’ve seen similar scores from other budget laptops costing £100 more than this, so the C50 performs quite respectably for a laptop in this price range.

It’s no speed demon, of course, but when using the Windows 8 fast-start option the C50 boots into the Start screen in a relatively snappy 20 seconds. We were also pleased to see that it was ready to start launching applications straight away, with there’s no thumb-twiddling or cursor-spinning while it got itself together. It’ll handle routine web browsing and work in Microsoft Office perfectly well, so it gets all the basics right for a budget laptop.

In fact, there are few obvious signs of compromise in the C50 at all. The 1366×768 resolution is perfectly acceptable at this price, and the 15.6-inch display provides a bright, detailed image that worked well in our streaming video tests. The horizontal viewing angles are very respectable – close to 150-degrees – with the only weakness being the more limited vertical viewing angle. The brightness of the screen drops off quite quickly even if you push it back just a couple of inches, so you might need to nudge the screen occasionally in order to improve visibility. The speakers are also a bit of a disappointment, sounding quite thin and lifeless, so you’ll want to use headphones or a set of external speakers for listening to music.

Build quality is quite good, though. The plastic case has a bit of a cheap-and-cheerful feel to it, but seems sturdy enough to cope with life in a backpack. It won’t break your back either, as Toshiba has managed to reduce the weight of the C50 to just 2.2kg. That’s well below average for a 15-inch laptop that has a built-in DVD drive, so you should be able to carry it down to a coffee shop for a spot of wifi browsing without too much trouble.

Specs