This £199 Windows 8.1 laptop is no bargain
Chromebooks are great budget laptops, but they can only run web apps, which is limiting if you have a favourite Windows program that has no online equivalent. The Toshiba Satellite CL10 is the first in a small wave of £200 Windows 8.1 laptops designed as an alternative to Chromebooks.
The CL10 looks surprisingly stylish for such a cheap laptop, with a bronze-coloured casing and a subtle checked pattern on the lid. It’s reasonably sturdy and weighs just 1.1kg, rising to 1.3kg with its charger. Combined with its respectably long battery life of seven and a half hours, this means it should be ideal for use on the move.
However, its poorly designed keyboard makes using the CL10 a pain. Some of the keys, such as tab and caps lock, are smaller than the others, which will trip up touch typists. The keys’ lack of travel and feedback makes typing frustratingly inaccurate and uncomfortable. Although the touchpad is smooth and accurate, its small size meant we often inadvertently activated gestures -such as swiping in from the right to show Windows’ Charms bar - while its buttons are uncomfortably stiff.
Performance is painfully slow. The dual-core Intel Celeron N2840 processor is paired with a meagre 2GB of memory and so was only fast enough to run very undemanding programs. While the CL10 just about coped with basic office work and simple image editing such as cropping, video editing is out of the question and the small amount of memory made it slow to a crawl when multiple programs were open. HD video sometimes stuttered, especially in fast-moving action scenes. Even web apps often ran slowly, especially when we had lots of browser tabs open, with Google Docs frequently struggling to keep up with our typing.
At least starting up and waking from sleep were fast due to the 32GB SSD. You will probably need to use external or online storage, though, as half of the SSD is taken up by Windows. Handily, 100GB of OneDrive online storage is provided free for two years. As expected the 11.6in display had poor contrast and tight viewing angles. Images also had a blue-ish tint, but it was at least bright.
The Toshiba Satellite CL10 is cheap and has long battery life, but it’s horribly flawed in almost every other way. It’s such poor value that we can’t possibly recommend it.
VERDICT
It may be incredibly cheap, but buying this laptop would be a false economy.
SPECIFICATIONS
2.16GHz Intel Celeron N2840 dual-core processor • 2GB memory • 32GB SSD • Intel integrated graphics • 11.6in screen 1366x768 pixels • 802.11b/g/n • Windows 8.1 • 1.1kg weight (1.3kg with charger) • 20x289x199mm (HxWxD) • One-year warranty