Toshiba Satellite C75-A-13N review

Our biggest concern was the C75-A-13N’s keyboard. The keys themselves are very well spaced, but their flat design meant they gave very little tactile feedback while we were typing. This meant we were repeatedly making mistakes as we weren’t sure whether we’d hit the keys correctly or not. It’s not as pronounced as other laptops we’ve tested, but it was enough of an issue to make typing long word documents a little frustrating.

The touchpad was also surprisingly small for such a large laptop. This wasn’t too much of a problem, though, as we liked its dedicated buttons and its lightly textured surface. Swiping from the side to perform Windows 8 gestures was a little more difficult, though, as the touchpad sits in a small recess away from the rest of the palm rest. This gets in the way of using Windows 8 gestures accurately, and they often took a few goes to get right. Fortunately, multi-touch gestures were much easier to control and we didn’t have any problem using two-finger scrolling or pinch-zooming.

The C75-A-13N’s battery life was good but not outstanding. We managed 5h and 7m in our light use test with the screen set to half brightness, which is around average for a laptop of this price.

The Toshiba Satellite C75-A-13N is a very powerful laptop for £530, but the keyboard’s poor tactile feedback was a big enough deal-breaker to prevent us from giving it a full recommendation. This is a shame, as the laptop would have been a good midpoint between slower cheaper models such as the Asus VivoBook X550CA and faster more expensive systems such as the PC Specialist Cosmos II HD. As it stands, though, the C75-A-13N is a good but flawed laptop that’s ultimately a little too frustrating to deserve your cash.