Welcome to a laptop battery specialist
of the Toshiba Laptop Battery
The Chromebook boots very quickly (which is to be expected given the on-board SSD and lightweight OS) and overall performance impressed. The Intel Celeron N2840 handled every regular task thrown at during my time using the laptop and only struggled when I deliberately put it under pressure (more of that shortly).
The Toshiba comes with 100GB of free cloud storage via Google Drive which had unfortunately been snapped up by a previous reviewer. In addition to the on-board 16GB SSD and the SD Card slot, this means that there’s ample storage options available for all users, especially given that being a Chromebook, most of your files will be stored in the cloud. Our machine had 4GB of RAM making it the Full HD model.There is a HD model which has just 2GB of RAM with battery such as Toshiba PA3635U-1BRM Battery, Toshiba PA3636U-1BRL Battery, Toshiba PA3728U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3817U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PABAS228 Battery, Toshiba PA3818U-1BRS Battery, Toshiba PA3634U-1BAS Battery, Toshiba Portege M800 Battery, Toshiba Satellite L310 Battery, Toshiba Satellite L510 Battery, Toshiba Portege T130 Battery, Toshiba Satellite U400 Battery, but given my experience, I’d recommend the Full HD model.
The Chromebook 2 easily handles HD video and I experienced no issues on regular, everyday tasks. Streamed and on-board video content worked well and looked great on the screen.
Being a curious sort, I decided to see how much pressure I could put on the Toshiba. With 30 Chrome tabs open, there was no perceivable change in performance. When I hit 50 open tabs, I did see some stuttered cursor movements and a bit of lag between typing and the characters appearing on-screen – but, hey, 50 tabs! I’d expect my Windows 7 laptop to be the same. As a further test, I opened some videos on Vimeo and ran them at full screen, full HD. At three open videos, I started experiencing a lot of lag and slow-play, with the base getting quite hot. But when I closed one, everything returned to normal.
I decided to stop being mean to the little Chromebook 2, and to be honest, are you really going to be watching two or more full HD videos at the same time on a 13.3″ screen? No you’re not.
The latest version of wifi, 802.11ac+agn is packaged in the machine and I had no issues with connectivity on a variety of networks during my time with the laptop. It also comes with Bluetooth 4.0, which I tested and found it to be as easy-to-use as expected. I can’t see a huge use for Bluetooth, but I might be being unimaginative and it’s always nice to have the option.