Toshiba Satellite L645D: Mobile AMD at 3GHz
by Dustin Sklavos on March 9, 2011 3:20 AM ESTLose the Gloss, Toshiba
Though most of the industry has been moving away from glossy plastic, it seems like Toshiba must be sitting on an absolute stockpile of it. That's the only explanation I can think of for how pervasive it is on their notebooks compared to the competition. While the Taiwanese manufacturers (Acer, Asus, Clevo, MSI, Compal) oftentimes have notions of style that seem unusual for American consumers, the thinking behind Toshiba's notebook aesthetic is downright inscrutable. Toshiba has been catering to Americans long enough to know better and for a time they did; older Toshiba notebooks were more austere and of generally excellent quality.
Our review unit comes with a cherry red lid and interior finish, but Toshiba offers black, silver, and brown finishes as well. Glossy plastic on the lid can be irritating but at least makes a modicum of sense, and under all of the colored finishes is a tasteful pattern.
The color scheme inside the notebook is also reasonably tasteful, but again the major complaint is the relentless use of glossy plastic: the only place Toshiba doesn't employ it is the bottom of the unit. For a second it looked like they might have gone with matte plastic for the speaker grilles above the keyboard, but then I looked at them from another angle and they reflected a healthy enough amount of light to prove me wrong. Of course there's glossy plastic used for the screen bezel, too, but at least it doesn't seem as asinine here (where glossy plastic is used everywhere) as it does on other notebooks (where glossy plastic is only used on the bezel and maybe the lid.)
The more astute reader has probably noticed fingerprints on the image of the keyboard: that's because the L645D's keyboard is glossy and flex-riddled. Typing on it isn't a tremendous chore, but it's not a pleasant experience either. The keys feel somewhat mushy, and the odd bevelling of the surfaces combined with the glossy finish feels downright bizarre to the touch. The WASD cluster on my desktop keyboard looks like Pigpen had a field day with it; I can't imagine what these keys are going to look like when they're put under aggressive use.
The delineation of the touchpad beneath the keyboard is next to impossible to spot in the photo, but it sports a different texture in use and is surprisingly comfortable. This is actually one of the strong suits of the L645D; while using it I've never felt a great need to plug in an external mouse the way I have with other review units, and there's even a dedicated touchpad toggle. There's strong action on the buttons, too.
Toshiba advertises "Dolby Advanced Audio" for their speakers, but in practice I found sound quality to be par for the course as far as laptop speakers are concerned: tinny, devoid of bass, and needing to be nearly maxed out to reach an enjoyable audio level. In a pinch these are going to be fine, but anyone planning on using this notebook for multimedia is going to want to either connect other speakers or use headphones.
Finally, the bottom of the notebook has the usual and much appreciated hatches for the user-upgradeable memory, hard disk, and wireless connectivity.
While I haven't been the most charitable to Toshiba in regard to the design of the L645D, there's a crucial component missing here that bears repeating: pardon my French, but the damn thing can be found for $619. At that price, Toshiba is aiming this thing square at Joe Sixpack, someone who wants as much computer as he can get without spending up.
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kmmatney - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
Agreed. I have 4-year old 1930 x 1200 Dell, and had a look at a possible replacement. I couldn't find anything at Dell with more than 1080 pixels, and even that was hard to find and cost a lot. I have to give Apple credit for still using 1920 x 1200 resolution in their laptops. 1366 x 766 is total crap - especially with the extra vertical bloat in Windows 7.KiwiTT - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
and on the 768 height, once you add the toolbars etc. You may only have half the screen left.Don't manufacturers do real user usability testing? If they did, they'd soon come to light that 768 is abysmally small.
bhima - Wednesday, March 9, 2011 - link
Your colorful language throughout the article made it a blast to read. Kudos Dustin!Dustin Sklavos - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
Thanks, much appreciated. :)helboy - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
"It seems like manufacturers almost deliberately cripple AMD-based notebooks."Had been my doubt also for the past one year or so!! Almost all the notebooks that carry the "not enough battery life" label after reviews,the battery provided will be of inferior capacity.AND the reviewers mostly ignore this fact when highlighting poor backup.I wonder whether winning the anti-trust case is helping AMD much in the marketing war.
cdeeter - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
+1 Yeah what's the deal with giving AMD systems smaller batteries? They are using the same chassis so use the same battery!silverblue - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
I can just imagine Intel realising they can't use one method to push AMD out of the market and then deciding to use another, albeit more subtle method. :P After all, battery life is king for a lot of people, so you need to prove those claims of long running times...And anyway, on an unrelated note, isn't it about time AMD got a stupid jingle for people to associate their products with? Everyone knows the Intel jingle.
jackylman - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
I picked up my new baby at a liquidation sale for the same price. It has the same CPU/GPU combo, but a 15.6" screen, webcam, gigabit LAN. On the downside, the hard disk is smaller (500GB) and no Blu-ray, but I'd rather have a bigger screen and a webcam.fumigator - Thursday, March 10, 2011 - link
Despite all the criticism, I like this laptop. Thanks for the great review.Only thing I would like to say is that I miss somehow the lack of nvidia chipsets on laptops.
I've owned an MSI VR630 that came with a geforce 9100 IGP and Turion X2 RM70 and I miss it all day. It was simply superb.
Later on the ATI 3200s and 4200s IGP started to pop up like maries and somewhat the 9100 started to look old. But even those MSI that came with Nforce 8200 and intel Core solutions were far better than any HD4500 based notebook. Lets say, MSI CR400, CR500, CR600 all came with Nforce 8200 and Intel something (Celeron dual core / Pentium dual core / Core 2 Duo etc, depending on submodel) Now they are all discontinued and nobody did serious reviews on them.
Moreover, i own an AM2+ motherboard with the Nforce chipset 8200 IGP as well, and I can't complain.
swaaye - Monday, March 14, 2011 - link
My mom wanted a notebook with a Bluray drive because she travels a lot for work and lives in a hotel for days at a time. So it's her mobile media center. I found a $600 Sony with a 2.0 GHz Core 2, 4GB and GMA 4500 something like 18 months ago.This Toshiba seems like the latest edition of that kind of thing. For what these are used for the performance might not even be tangibly different.