Toshiba Satellite L745D-S4220

Looking for an affordable, simple and cost effective laptop for your school going kid? Well, then Toshiba Satellite L745D-S4220 can

be the one for you. The laptop has been designed for carrying out simple applications and light tasks and Toshiba promises that the laptop has been packed with features to give a decent performance. Is it indeed so? Does the laptop deliver a performance with its AMD dual-core processor and graphics. Check out our exclusive Toshiba Satellite L745D-S4220 review to know the answer for yourself.

Looks And Design

When you first look at the laptop, you will find the design and looks of Satellite L745D-S4220 very much similar to other budgetary Satellite notebooks manufactured by Toshiba. The chassis is made up of a mixture of glossy and matte plastic. The shell has been designed in a manner so that everything can fit in well. The lid of the screen is made up of thin glossy plastic. Though the glossy plastic makes the laptop look bright and shiny but at the same time it makes the machine vulnerable to smudges and fingerprints.

The laptop is carved entirely out of plastic. Because of this, you can feel some “squeak” in areas where there are thin plastics. School kids must be careful while using the laptop as the plastic can be subjected to wear and tear.

Keypad And Touchpad

Satellite L745D is equipped with a full size keyboard and the keys are flat in nature. You will find the keyboard very much similar to chiclet-style keyboard. The layout of the keyboard is very good and the keys are well spaced out which gives a decent typing experience. The keys are glossy in nature and are quite large. Because of the glossy nature of the keys, they begin to show smudges after sometime. We were a bit disappointed to find that there is no LED backlighting in the keyboard which will facilitate writing under low lighting.

The touchpad boasts of matte texture which provides a very smooth cursor movement. The navigation is pretty smooth and the touchpad buttons are also very good. The touchpad button, however, makes little sounds when they are pressed which sometimes may become a bit annoying.

Screen

L745D sports a 14.0 inches diagonal screen which displays pictures of resolution measuring 1366×768 pixels. The display is average and the contrast of the picture is reasonably sharp. The colors appeared to be a bit saturated. The vertical angles are however narrow and viewing angles are average. The horizontal resolution is good, but the narrow vertical resolution means that one needs to do a good amount of scrolling to surf the net or read something on the screen. If you are looking forward to enjoy 1080p videos, then you will be disappointed as the screen is not that good enough to stream such videos.

Specs

• Processor: AMD E-Series Processor E-350
• OS: Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit)
• Graphics Engine: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6310
• Memory: 4GB DDR3
• HDD: 500 GB
• Display Size: 14 inches widescreen
• Display Type: HD TruBrite LED Backlit Display
• Audio: Microphone jack (mono), Standard stereo speakers, Headphone jack (stereo)
• Wi-Fi: Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
• USB Ports: 2-USB (2.0) ports, 1-USB (2.0) port with Sleep and Charge
• HDMI: HDMI output port
• Weight: 5 lbs
• Color: Fusion Finish in Matrix Silver

Audio

The speakers of the notebook are not branded in nature and they are located above the keyboard. The audio quality of the speakers is good enough and it fills maximum area of a room. The grills of the speakers are large but the real speakers occupy only a little amount of underneath the grills. If you want to enjoy premium sound from the speakers, then you need to invest on external speakers or on high quality earphones.

Ports

Toshiba has packed Satellite L745D with a good set of ports. There are three USB 2.0 ports, a HDMI, VGA, Ethernet, DVD drive and a memory card slot. However we were disappointed to find that there is no USB 3.0 or eSATA port. Probably this has been done to keep the price of the laptop affordable.

Heat

Thanks to the AMD E-350 processor, the laptop remains fairly cool when kept on lap. Even while we played HD videos putting pressure on the processor and the graphics temperatures did not raise to a great extent. It is to be noted that the processor was designed to be inserted into netbooks, but since Toshiba has put it into a large sized laptop there is ample amount of air flow which keeps the notebook fairly cool. The fans will adjust when needed and the noise levels are also kept fairly low.

Graphics And Performance

Graphics in the notebook is powered by HD 6310 graphics which is decent enough for browsing the web, editing photos or watching HD movies on the machine. However, if you are looking forward to edit HD movies or play the latest HD video games on the machine, you need to spend a bit on the machine and upgrade the graphics card. Satellite L745D is small but it gives a good performance of graphics and processor. The performance of the machine is slackened a bit with its slow hard drive. The 5400 rpm impacted opening up of files and Windows Startup.

Accessories

The notebook is packed with standard accessories such as an adapter, power cord and user manual.

Battery Life

The laptop is equipped with a 6 cell battery which gives a runtime of around 5 hours which is decent enough.

Price

Priced at approximately $ 500, Toshiba Satellite L745D-S4220 is a powerful enough machine to carry out most of the tasks. If the hard drive would have been a bit more strong then it would have been better. But undoubtedly the laptop is capable of carrying more than just web surfing or writing school papers.