Toshiba Satellite Pro C50-A-1MM review

A great little workhorse

Toshiba Satellite Pro C50-A-1MM
Toshiba Satellite Pro C50-A-1MM

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We liked

The C50 is solidly built and the Celeron 1005M that powers it is good enough to handle modest multi-tasking, office applications and web browsing jobs, plus it's fairly quiet and runs cool. Its speakers are surprisingly good thanks partly to their location.

We disliked

This laptop is massive but that doesn't come with any added benefits. Its battery life is far lower than we'd expect and its poor graphics performance means that anything other than casual gaming (or games in low settings) will translate to a disappointing user experience.

Final verdict

The C50 is a solid budget laptop which is an impressive value for money proposition, and offers plenty of storage. It is likely to be more powerful than sub-£200 laptops like the Asus X200MA while costing only about 10% extra, but this performance gain is offset by losses on the battery life and portability fronts. Also, there's nothing special about the C50 that differentiates it from other consumer laptops (there's no Windows 8.1 Pro, for example).

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.