Review: Toshiba Satellite P845t laptop

JOE managed to get our hands on a slick piece of kit in the Toshiba P845t (catchy, we know) Satellite laptop recently...

By Adrian Collins

The Toshiba P845t-102 mightn't have the catchiest name in the world, but it was a pretty solid machine when we got our paws on it.

Let's get the specs and stuff stuff out of the way first, it's packing an Intel i3 processor, which is nice and speedy, 6GB of RAM and a hard drive of around 640GB hard drive. It also runs on Windows 8, and given that it has a 14” touchscreen, it was much easier to navigate our way around the updated Start menu.

While at first it's a little bit difficult to get used to using a touchscreen, mouse and keyboard at the same time, you do eventually get to grips with it, and it becomes a handy option.

However it is tricky to get into some files and folders when you're looking for something beyond the usual, and the difference between using an app and a conventional program becomes pretty apparent when you try to find your files on Dropbox, for instance, which was difficult enough. That's not the fault of the computer though, it's one of the "quirks" of using Windows 8.

When it comes to battery life, we were pretty impressed with how this stood up to the test when we spent the morning working on it off the battery. It gave us no grief until nearly four hours in, and we had it multi-tasking the whole time, editing images, using word processor and surfing the net, so that's not a bad showing all told.

As for media, the two Harmon Kardon speakers that are built in are nice and powerful, and you get good sound quality out of them even at higher volumes so this would be a good option for watching movies and DVDs. You can also have the Netflix app on the go too through Windows 8, which is a nice convenient option.

With a price tag of just over €800 (depending on retailer) however, it would have to really stand out to make you want to stump up the extra cash for the touchscreen - which is the real selling point from our point of view on this model.

At (apparently) just over 2kg, this is also a slight bit on the chunky side compared to say an ultrabook or something along those lines, so if you're looking for portability this mightn't be the best option.

However, if you want to get work done without worrying about battery life and speed is going to be an issue for you, then at this price, the Toshiba is a pretty decent choice, and we couldn't fault it on that front.