Toshiba Satellite P755D-S5172 Pro Reviews

Despite its quad-core CPU, Toshiba's 'everyday value' laptop fails to deliver exceptional performance. But it has a Blu-ray drive and good sound, and you can play your iPod through the speakers even when the laptop is turned off.

The Toshiba Satellite P755D is, first and foremost, a notebook for the budget consumer market. It's not necessarily meant to be a particularly exciting piece of hardware; it's meant to fill a niche, offer value to specific end users, and basically to just be an inexpensive computer that can handle most tasks and watch a movie once in a while. Taken on those terms, the P755D is successful. It's pretty clear that Toshiba made a series of tradeoffs to get the Blu-ray drive into a notebook at as low a price point as possible, and a visit to NewEgg will see that they were mostly successful in that respect. The only notebook NewEgg offers that isn't a refurbished model and is less expensive than the P755D is a strikingly similar Gateway unit, but you sacrifice hard drive capacity, USB 3.0 connectivity, Bluetooth, and carrying weight in the process. If you're in the market for a notebook with Blu-ray, that's something you'll have to weigh on your own.

In conclusion, out of the 30-odd preconfigured versions of the Satellite P755 offered by Toshiba, the P755D-S5172 offers a decent but not exciting design, pretty good graphics performance, and a Blu-ray player for $699 -- but AMD's A-series CPU platform simply can't compete with even entry-level Intel CPUs in most tests, making this midpriced laptop feel more like a budget system.