Toshiba Satellite P755 review: Toshiba Satellite P755

Laptops that can tackle games are traditionally huge beasts slathered in glowing lights and angry-looking vents. The Toshiba Satellite P755 will happily take on your games without making such a fuss about it.

Our model, the P755-113, came with an Intel Core i5 processor, 6GB of RAM and a dedicated Nvidia GeForce 3410M graphics card.

It’s available from £1,000.

Design and build quality

The P755 is pretty much the little brother of the P770. Instead of packing a massive 17-inch screen, it offers a more modest 15.6-inch display, giving the laptop a more compact size.

At 380mm wide and 254mm deep, it’s not the most portable of machines, but it’s much easier to slide into a bag than the 17-inch sibling. With a weight of 2.6kg, you won’t be too knackered when you take it across town to your friend’s place.

It’s not as portable as the ultra-light elites such as the Asus Zenbook UX31, but it’s not designed to be. The P755 is better suited to being plonked down on a desk for some video and gaming action and only occasionally taken somewhere. If travel is on your mind, you probably shouldn’t be looking too closely at this machine.

It has the same casing as the P770, which is bad news if you like bright colours, but great news if you’re into plain black plastic with an odd wood grain effect. The plastic at first seems pretty strong, but a few minutes of prodding and poking uncovers some weak spots in the build — most notably in the large amount of flex in the keyboard tray and in the plastic that runs beneath the trackpad, which comes away from the body.

It’s pretty disappointing to find these weaknesses in any machine, especially one that costs you a cool grand. If we’re paying that sort of cash, we’d really want to feel satisfied with a premium build quality and the P755 just doesn’t deliver.

The keyboard provides further disappointment. It uses square, isolated keys that are spread a good distance apart, but it’s sadly not particularly responsive. We often found that it missed letters during typing. This resulted in considerably more errors than we normally make. We found the arrow keys were similarly unresponsive in gaming — we had to make a conscious effort to be firm in our pressing to ensure that it would register.

The trackpad is big and responsive but for some reason doesn’t support multi-touch gestures so there’s no two-fingered scrolling. Instead, you’ll have to scroll manually with the classic ‘click and hold, swipe’ method, which we thought we’d left behind in 2006, along with phones without app stores.

The speakers come courtesy of audio specialist Harman Kardon and provide a decent level of din for watching videos or playing games. They’re above average for laptop speakers, but they’re still far from ideal. Hook a good set of speakers up or whack in some powerful headphones for a really immersive experience.

Screen

The 15.6-inch screen has a resolution of 1,366×768 pixels, which isn’t quite pushing the boundaries of full HD. Normally, we wouldn’t argue about this, but the P755 comes with a Blu-ray drive to show off movies in HD so it’s annoying that the screen isn’t capable of properly displaying your discs. If you want to enjoy your high-def movies, you can hook the laptop up to a TV via the HDMI port.