Toshiba Satellite Radius L10W-B

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Slightly over a year ago I had to visit JB-Hi-Fi, a technology store in Australia, and purchase a laptop for school with the budget of $600 AUD, at the time about $450 USD. This was the only laptop available at that price-point. I had to leave the store with a laptop so this is what I've got, It's an 11.6' laptop with a Pentium N3450, 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB 5400rpm HDD and a 1366x768  touch-screen, 360 degree hinge and 6 hours of advertised battery life.

 

I was looking for a laptop that could be used for Microsoft office and web browsing, pretty light on the specifications. Because of that this review will focus more on the experience of using this laptop with quick mention of the specifications.

 

The quad core Pentium and 4GBs of RAM is enough to handle web browsing and PowerPoint at the same, the most demanding workload I required from it. It can also run Minecraft at 30FPS with everything on the lowest settings, render distance of 6 using OptiFIne for 1.8. No complaints there unlike almost every other element of this laptop. Moving on to the screen, a very major part of the experience of using a laptop. It has a resolution of 1366x768, sized at 11.6 inches with a glossy coating. it features 10 point multi-touch and is on a 360 degree hinge. These all sound like positive things, 1366x768 is good enough on a screen of this size, a glossy coating makes the colours nicer and who doesn't like to turn their laptop into a 2cm thick tablet. Another cool feature is the ability to radically change the colour of the image by tilting the screen 5 degrees off angle, perfect if you don't want others to see what you're doing however the coolest feature of them all is the colour temperature, everything looks dull even after a huge boost in saturation from the HD graphics control panel. Remember to keep this laptop out of direct sunlight, it converts your screen and the energy from the sun into extremely high resolution images of fingerprints and that's it. so lets move onto the next major element of a laptop, the keyboard. The layout is decent excluding the CAPS LOCK and TAB keys which are too short, smaller than the size of the average key which isn't actually a thing, I was referring to keys like the A key and the 1 key. There are other assorted keys that are a bit thinner, no big deal. The keyboard has next to no travel and has cnstant issues with not registering eys, especiall the Caps Lock ky which only registers 1 in 3 times, this is the only sntence in the review where I haven't fixed all of te occasions where a kestroke did not register. It is the least satisfying typing experience I've ever used, worse than typing on a phone. I'm faster and more accurate typing on a 4 inch touchscreen than this keyboard. 0/10. So now we move on to the trackpad, which is the only reason I ever use the touchscreen. It has many issues with just not tracking, has loads of acceleration and doesn't work when using the keyboard in most situations. When it is working its decent. Its a cheap laptop so i didn't expect too much in terms of build quality and design. I was neither impressed nor dis-appointed in that regard although I was very dis-appointed after buying an SSD to upgrade the HDD which constantly makes audible clicking and whirring noises to find that after removing the screws on the bottom of the laptop you'd need to undo clips which would likely break and void my warranty.

 

 

Spoiler

Overall I'd give this laptop a 3/10. Specs are decent, touchpad, keyboard, monitor and HDD are all terrible, which are the main concerns in a laptop used for schoolwork