Toshiba Satellite L355: Walmart’s $348 Laptop Reviewed
Our friends over at Laptop Magazine got their hands on the Toshiba Satellite L355. This 17″ laptop is available exclusively at Walmart and rings in at just $348.
Low price points can be appealing, but not everyone is best served by a netbook. The nice thing about the Toshiba Satellite L355 is that it offers consumers choice in the $300 range.
The Toshiba Satellite L355 isn’t going to win any speed races any time soon, but it does offer a lot of value. It comes with a 250GB hard drive, DVD+/-RW, 3GB of RAM and a 2.2GHz Intel Celeron processor. Its 17″ screen has a resoluton of 1440×900, which is a heck of a lot easier to use at home than a 10.1″ netbook display
On the negative side, the Satellite L355 doesn’t have a webcam and is slow when it comes to multitasking. Playing video games is a struggle as is transcoding media files.
The Satellite L355 is a great bargain and will suffice for those with pretty basic needs. If you’re looking for performance you’ll want to look elsewhere.
The price point is very attractive and after all is said and done, the Satellite L355 earned an Editor’s Choice award from Laptop Magazine.
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What’s the graphics chipset in this? Some derivative of Intel G45?
@George Ou: This Wal-Mart model has a Celeron M 585, and from what I’ve read so far all of the Intel-based models have 4500M. (I would like to give my experience gaming on this chipset. It runs higher-end games at low-to-mid settings just fine, about on par with entry level graphics from nVidia and AMD. One thing to keep in mind is that Intel has been stretching performance quite a lot out of their graphics chips by refining the drivers. In Linux, for example, the GEM is letting some of these chips loose on Linux games.)
There seems to be an AMD-based version of the L350 series, which I haven’t seen for sale anywhere yet, equipped with a Radeon 3100. Most benchmarks put the Radeon about 50% faster than the Intel 4500M, but newer drivers have helped Intel much more than AMD, so updated numbers may not be so different.
What’s the graphics chipset in this? Some derivative of Intel G45?
@George Ou: This Wal-Mart model has a Celeron M 585, and from what I’ve read so far all of the Intel-based models have 4500M. (I would like to give my experience gaming on this chipset. It runs higher-end games at low-to-mid settings just fine, about on par with entry level graphics from nVidia and AMD. One thing to keep in mind is that Intel has been stretching performance quite a lot out of their graphics chips by refining the drivers. In Linux, for example, the GEM is letting some of these chips loose on Linux games.)
There seems to be an AMD-based version of the L350 series, which I haven’t seen for sale anywhere yet, equipped with a Radeon 3100. Most benchmarks put the Radeon about 50% faster than the Intel 4500M, but newer drivers have helped Intel much more than AMD, so updated numbers may not be so different.