Welcome to a Laptop Battery specialist of the Toshiba Laptop Battery
Why can't I get what I want? It doesn't seem too complicated to me, but I find myself frustrated at every turn by the PC industry. Maybe it's a pipe dream, but I want a reasonably thin, reasonably good-looking laptop, with a high-quality touch screen, and a decent discrete graphics card for gaming. Of course, I don't want to pay too much for it.
The Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277 with battery such as Toshiba Tecra A7 Battery
, Toshiba Tecra A9 Battery
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is the latest to promise this to the world, but deliver significantly less. It's painfully close to being a near-perfect laptop, offering a new fourth-generation Intel Core i7 CPU, a reasonably good Nvidia GeForce 740M graphics card, 12GB of RAM, and a huge 1TB hard drive, all for $999.
What's not to like? Well, if you've got a solid CPU-GPU combo for playing games, you're going to want a decent screen to play on, and that's where the S55t-A5277 falls painfully short. While it's a touch screen, which is practically a requirement for Windows 8 these days, it has a low screen resolution of 1,366x768 pixels. That's rare in midprice, midsize laptops these days, and I can't imagine feeling good about paying $999 for a laptop that's not at least 1,600x900. On top of that, the screen just doesn't look very good.
The offset buttonless click pad is closer to the left side of the laptop body, centered under the similarly offset keyboard (the number pad pushes the keyboard and touch pad to the left). The pad itself is large, so there's room for multitouch gestures, and two-finger scrolling is reasonably smooth.
No company is as adept at cluttering the Windows 8 tile interface with adware as Toshiba. By default, you're treated to full- and half-size tiles for WildTangent games, as well as Vimeo, Hulu Plus, Norton, eBay, I Heart Radio, and others. This was the industry standard several years ago, to be sure, but since then, most PC makers have moved to a more stripped-down initial setup, knowing that consumers like to pick and choose what tiles, icons, and shortcuts they see every day.
But despite everything there is to like about the system's design, components, and features, you can't get away from that screen. On a true budget laptop, a 1,366x768-pixel-resolution, 15.6-inch screen with an overly glossy glass overlay and poor off-axis viewing might be a reasonable tradeoff, but for $999, and with the expectation that the included Nvidia GeForce 740M graphics card is going to be used for gaming, it's tough to swallow. For everyday use, it'll suffice, but you'll find a lack of screen space, and it's not even optimal for 1080p HD video content.
The Harman Kardon speakers, long a Toshiba staple, are good for a 15-inch laptop, but not especially distinguishable from other midsize multimedia systems. With more space for bigger speakers, the 17.3-inch Qosmio X75 we tested recently had the kind of room-filling sound you want from a laptop that's playing games, movies, or music.
The Toshiba Satellite S55t-A5277 comes so tantalizingly close to being my perfect slim, midprice gaming laptop that the ways it falls short feel even more pronounced. Just having the option to put these high-end parts in a very mainstream-looking 15-inch laptop is a big plus, but hitting that $999 price clearly dictated some cut corners along the way. In this case, the low-quality, low-resolution screen is such a visible part of the machine that it makes it hard to appreciate how good the rest of it is.