Toshiba Satellite C55-B5300 250-Dollar 15.6″ Laptop

The Toshiba Satellite C55-B5300 is a classic full-size laptop computer with an extremely low price tag of $250. There isn’t anything special about this laptop, as expected at the price point. However, the C55-B5300 can be a useful computing tool in your house, office, or dorm room. Besides support for all programs running on the latest generation of Windows 0S, the laptop offers a 15.6-inch 1366-by-768 pixel display and a full-size keyboard with numeric pad and trackpad. High pixel density, touchscreen, and keyboard backight are missing, but the notebook anyway brings more productivity comfort than the tablets with similar price tags. If you need a device for just movie watching and web browsing, you might be satisfied with some of the cheap Android tablets, but when it comes to Excel spreadsheet editing, email typing, or similar work, full-size Windows laptops have a great advantage. The C55-B5300 is among the cheapest of them.

It’s outfitted with a DVD writer, stereo speakers, webcam, tree USB ports, HDMI and VGA video outputs, Wi-Fi and Ethernet LAN Internet connections, and a multimedia card reader. Overall, a standard 2014 budget notebook feature set.

Performance-wise, the included Intel Celeron N2840 dual-core processor is a very basic chip. It’s only a tad faster than the more widely adopted N2830. More about its performance can be found here, and the N2840 will complete tasks at only slightly faster speed. They can handle Windows and non-demanding web and office operations plus multimedia consumption, but don’t have sufficient potential for complex stuff like video editing or high-resolution gaming. The N2830 has similar performance to the Intel Atom processors found in the affordable Windows tablets. They belong to the same “Bay Trail” processor family anyway. The C55-B5300 has 4GB of RAM memory, double the size of RAM in the common Atom-powered tablets. Hard drive is 500GB large. This is a common size among the inexpensive notebooks. If you’re generally interested in this notebook, but want beefier components, you can check out some of the other Satellite C55 series models with the same design.

The battery is a 4-cell unit. The manufacturer hasn’t disclosed info on battery life, but given the laptop has a 4-cell battery and the power efficient “Bay Trail” processor, it safe to assume it will last about 5 hours or more.