Proper shopping for a laptop requires keeping a close eye out for the best balance between performance, features, and price that you can find. The Toshiba Satellite P745-S4217 ($859.99 list, at Best Buy) offers a reasonable amount of all three, with its optical drive being particularly worthy of notice. It's not the most powerful or longest-lasting laptop on the market?for PCs, our Editors' Choice, the Asus U41JF-A1, remains tops overall. But for a mainstream, everyday kind of laptop, it's well appointed all around.
Design and Features
The P745-S4217's look is not complicated, but it's not bad. Dark gray in color, with textured horizontal lines of varying widths sweeping both the cover and the inner and outer borders of the keyboard, the laptop has a suave, adult look. This is complemented by the glossy black chiclet keys and the glowing white lights that can be found on the power button, media keys, and lining the multitouch-enabled touchpad. The black bezel around the LED-backlit, 14-inch, 1,366-by-768 display completes the look, and houses the webcam and microphone to boot. Weighing 4.9 pounds, the P745-S4217-A1 is not unduly heavy.
Nor is it particularly lightweight when it comes to components. The CPU is a second-generation Intel Core (aka "Sandy Bridge") model: the Core i5-2410M, a dual-core chip that can marshal four processing threads at once (thanks to Hyper-Threading) and can up its standard 2.3GHz speed to 2.9GHz using Intel's Turbo Boost technology under certain circumstances. The 6GB of DDR3 RAM and 640GB hard drive round out the slate of hardware; the P745-S4217 also uses the CPU's standard (integrated) Intel HD Graphics 3000, which should prove fine for most everyday uses, and a pair of good-sounding Harman Kardon speakers.
On the right edge of the laptop you'll find the headphone and microphone jacks, HDMI and VGA outputs, and a USB 3.0 port; the last is a nice addition that allows for significantly higher-speed data transfers than you can get with USB 2.0. If that slower version of USB is okay by you, you'll find two ports supporting it on the left edge, along with the Ethernet jack and this laptop's most compelling feature: a Blu-ray combo drive (that also burns DVDs), so you can watch high-definition movies on your HDTV. A card reader is located on the front-right edge.
The P745-S4217 is also equipped with the major wireless technologies: 802.11n Wi-Fi, Intel's Wireless Display (WiDi 2.0)?a technology for sending content directly from your laptop to your television (though you'll need the $99 Netgear Push2TV adapter?and WiMAX for high-speed connectivity.
Performance
For almost any everyday task, the P745-S4217 is more than suitable. It used Handbrake to convert a video file to a format ready for playing on an iPod or iPhone in a highly respectable 1 minute and 53 seconds, and needed 4 minutes and 10 seconds to apply 12 filters to a large image in Adobe Photoshop CS5. (For comparison, the Asus U41JF-A1 needed 4 minutes and 52 seconds.) The P745-S4217's result of 2.61 in our CineBench R11.5 rendering test is also just ahead of other laptops in this category; the closest competitor is Apple's Thunderbolt-equipped 13-inch MacBook Pro, which earned 2.59.
Gaming, however, is not among the P745-S4217's stronger suits. Its frame rate of 12.8 frames per second (fps) in Crysis, at 1,024-by-768 resolution at the medium level of detail, is functionally worthless; the Asus U41JF-A1 is genuinely playable at this resolution, and nabbed 46.6fps in our tests. The P745-S4217's 18.5fps in the DirectX 9 (DX9) version of Lost Planet 2 is hardly much better, especially compared to the Asus' serviceable 33.7fps. (You can forget entirely about DX11 games, too?Sandy Bridge integrated graphics is good for at most DX10.1.)
With its 48Wh battery lasting 4 hours 43 minutes in our rundown test with MobileMark 2007, the P745-S4217 is about average in terms of uptime, too. The Asus U41JF-A1 laptop remains the champ here, with a stunning 8:19, though the Samsung QX410-S02, at 7:08, is another strong choice if longevity is your aim.
The Toshiba Satellite P745-S4217 is fine on the plug if you want to use it for serving up Blu-ray movies, definitely one of the best uses for this machine. Just because it doesn't game?or chug along on battery?as well as our Asus U41JF-A1 Editors' Choice, doesn't mean it's not worthy of your attention if you want a portable system that you can be assured will do a variety of things well.
BENCHMARK TEST RESULTS
COMPARISON TABLE
Compare the Toshiba Satellite P745-S4217 with several other laptops side by side.
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