Toshiba Satellite L745D-S4220: Our Deal of the Week

The 14-inch Toshiba Satellite L745D-S4220 is a general-use notebook with a price point doable for students returning to school in the fall. For $450, users receive a system with an AMD E-350 dual-core processor with an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 6310 GPU, 4GB DDR3 memory at 1066MHz, and a 500GB capacity hard disk drive at 5400rpm.

In our review of the notebook we said its highlights include good HD and light gaming performance and a responsive keyboard that is easy to type on. Its build quality is standard for the rest of the budget-priced Satellite line; it features a rounded clamshell chassis with a mixture of matte and glossy plastics in brown and black.
We said that it comes with an adequate selection of ports: three USB 2.0 ports, a DVD optical drive, HDMI, VGA, Ethernet, and a lock slot.

The full-sized keyboard is a hybrid between a traditional and island-style keyboard. It features flat keys that are not spaced apart so they offer great key-travel and responsiveness. The matte Synaptics touchpad is textured and the drivers allow for smooth cursor sailing.
For its price, the performance of this system at this configuration was surprisingly good--we said its hardware makes the notebook "small yet powerful." It will be good for doing tasks such as writing papers, browsing the web, and watching films, for example. The AMD E-350 processor performed slightly better in the synthetic benchmark tests than the processor in our HP

Pavilion dm1 review unit. The battery life is also a plus--during our standard battery test the notebook remained on and active for five hours and eleven minutes.
More specs: