Toshiba Satellite L740 Review

For a budget laptop, this one does have a trick or two up its sleeve, as far as sheer performance is concerned. Working within the limitations imposed to keep the price down, this one can be a capable budget laptop or desktop replacement. We say desktop replacement, because the battery life is a disappointment.

Look & Feel
Straightaway, the glossy black finish is a bit of a turn-off – for being a scratch, dust and fingerprint magnet. The same finish continues through the entire lid and all areas around the keyboard except the touchpad. There is a neat imprint design on it though, which reminds us of when HP first started to do the wave imprint on the Pavilion DV range of notebooks a few years back. This one isn’t as profound, but is subtly relevant.

Above the keyboard are the stereo speakers and the power key. No dedicated keys for multimedia playback or accessing the web. Whatever quick access keys are there are on the shared with the FN keys. The LAN port, HDMI out, 2 USB ports and the headphone/ mic jacks are on the left side. A considerably profound cooling vent is there as well. On the right are the optical drive, another USB port, and the DVI connection. Nothing on the back, since the hinge placement ensures that the lid goes all the way down when opened.

To the left of the touchpad, just on the side is a cluster of notification lights -charger connection, power, battery, hard drive, memory card and Wi-Fi. They aren’t marked very well, and you’ll have to squint considerably to know which one means what. Till you remember that by heart, that is! The memory card slot is just below that.

Overall, while this is a well-built laptop with no evident rough edges, what gives away its price is the bulky design and the complete plastic treatment throughout. Slightly slimmer, and it would have looked a lot better.

Features & Performance
While it isn’t an old processor (considering it was launched in the second quarter of 2011), it isn’t the newer gen Core i3 or Core i5 either. The Pentium B940 (Sandy Bridge family) clocks at 1995MHz and is paired with 3GB of RAM. Toshiba preloads the laptop with Windows 7 Home Basic in the 32-bit version. If you do consider upgrading the RAM to 4GB or more, we suggest switching to a 64-bit version of the OS. Graphics are the Intel HD 2000 series, which isn’t going to allow for gaming at all. Except solitaire that is! We were surprised with the PC Mark Vantage score of 4195, which slots it cleanly in the “I am not a slouch by any stretch of the imagination” category. The Graphics score brings down the Windows Experience Index of 5.0. The processor gets a score of 5.8, while the hard drive scores 5.9. All these scores are out of 7.9.

The 14-inch display is the basic LCD one, with a resolution of 1366 x 760 pixels and 16:9 aspect ratio. What impressed us the most was that this display isn’t reflective at all, making it very comfortable to use – be it outdoors or in a typical office environment with lot of overhead lighting. Partly because of the non-reflective nature of the display, the viewing angles are much better than a lot of other laptops. While it does not have a very vivid colour handling, the crispness helps equally with multimedia viewing and anything to do with documents.

With a humongous 640GB hard drive, we are sure you wont run out of storage space anytime soon. The drive performance is quite good as well – it copies a zipped 4GB file in almost 103 seconds and 118 seconds for the unzipped 4GB folder.

Battery life is quite disappointing though. This one will run out of juice in an hour and 40 minutes, from full charge to complete discharge. You may get a bit more if the brightness is turned down and connectivity reduced to the bare minimum, but this still wont really cross 2 hours.

Our Take
For a price around Rs 30000, this is essentially a budget laptop that could fit well in the role of a desktop replacement. The performance is quite stable, and should not slow down under most heavy usage scenarios. No gaming though, since this only comes with integrated graphics. Built well, albeit a bit bulky. The real delight is the amazing display, and we thank God that there is some sense out there to put non-reflective displays on laptops. Alternatively, you could also consider the Lenovo G560, which will come with a newer Intel Core i3 processor, same 3GB of RAM, smaller 320GB hard drive but a bigger 15.6-inch display.

Price: Rs. 28,490

Contact: Toshiba India
Phone: 91-124 – 4996600
Email: http://www.toshiba-india.com/writeus.aspx