Toshiba Satellite M55 Review (pics, specs)

by Mike Walter, Wisconsin USA

A front view of the Toshiba Satellite M55-325

For the past number of years, I've owned a Compaq Armada V300. With its blazing 450MHz Celeron processor and bland black case it's nothing spectacular, but it's been a surprisingly adequate workhorse and well worth the money. Despite this, the laptop is starting to show it's age and the battery no longer holds a charge, which is the reason I needed to buy a new laptop.

Knowing I'll own this laptop for a long time to come, my expectations were relatively high. Since I'll mostly use it in my living room, I wanted something that is still somewhat mobile although it doesn't have to be ultra-portable. I'm not a gamer either and my main uses are office functions and Internet surfing. For this reason, I focused in on 14" laptops for their ample screen size and relatively low weight. I initially looked at some desktop replacements like the Dell Inspiron 6000, but they were just too big and heavy for me.

Where and How Purchased

For a long time I considered the HP DV1000 and the Dell Latitude D610. The DV1000 impressed me with it's features, however after evaluating them numerous times in stores I noticed that the bottom always seems to be white-hot just sitting on the store shelf. This generated visions of it burning a hole right through my shorts, which was the main reason I kept looking. The Dell I found difficult to evaluate since I can't just walk into a store and work with it or pick it up. I suppose if you know someone that has one it might be easier, but I just couldn't bring myself to buy a laptop sight unseen.

Then Toshiba released the Satellite M55. Since the major big-box retailers started stocking it soon after it's release, I had the opportunity to evaluate it on several occasions. While it had most of the features of the HP DV1000, the big thing I noticed is that it didn't seem to run nearly as hot as the DV1000. In the end I decided to purchase my M55 from the local CompUSA primarily because of their 21-day return policy with no restocking fee. This really impressed me because lately it seems that everyone has a restocking fee. Personally I think this only makes sense since brick and mortar stores have to compete with the direct online sales where often-times a buyer can get up to 30 days to return their purchase for refund.

Note: As of the submission date of this review, a CompUSA manager has informed me that CompUSA has recently changed their return policy to only allow in-store credit on laptop returns.

Toshiba Satellite M55 Configuration as Purchased:

• Toshiba Satellite M55-325 Model Number
• Intel Pentium M 740 processor (1.73 GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 533Mhz FSB)
• 512 MB RAM (max. 1.5GB) PC2700 DDR (333MHz)
• 100 GB 5400 RPM hard drive
• 14" WXGA TruBright screen
• 8x Dual Layer DVD+/-RW
• 6-in-1 Memory Card Reader
• Intel GMA 900 graphics card
• Windows XP Home
• $1199.00 USD

Form and Design



The construction of this laptop is all plastic, however that can be expected from most laptops in this price range. There is a little bit of flex on the back of the screen if I push on it, but I would characterize it as an average amount. When picking the M55 up it is incredibly light and although I didn't weigh it I can believe Toshiba's claim of around 5.3 pounds. The size is nicely portable checking in at 13.5"W x 9.53"L x 1.53"D. All this makes for a very attractive combination of portability, nice screen size and a ton of features.

When Toshiba released the M55, it announced that the laptop would be available in 3 colors (copper, gray and blue); mine has a peacock-blue screen-back that I found to be a nice departure from the institutional black and gray laptops. The rest of the laptop is the same silver and black design as all other recent Toshiba Satellite models. One of the more unique things I noticed about this model is that it seems Toshiba has shortened the palm-rest size slightly from what other manufactures are offering on similar models. At first this seemed like a good way to decrease the overall size of the laptop, but in practice it wasn't comfortable when typing.

The overall build quality on this laptop is quite poor in my opinion. As noted above, there is some flex in the screen-back and the palm-rest area has some flex to it as well. Perhaps the worst part about the construction is the keyboard. There is a large amount of flex to the keyboard that makes it very annoying to type.

Screen

The "TruBright" screen on the M55 is just beautiful to use in my opinion. It is a glare-type screen so I wasn't sure if I was going to like it, but it was easier to see in high light situations where my old laptop screen would simply have washed out. Using the M55 outside on a sunny July morning I was still able to read the screen although it was decidedly harder to see.
On the technical side, the screen has a maximum resolution of 1280x768. This is fairly typical of the 14" widescreen laptops I've seen however I would like to see the ability to step up to at least one higher resolution. Under normal usage I wasn't able to notice any dead pixels, but using Dead Pixel Buddy software I was able to find 4 dead pixels. Not exactly perfect, but since I can't find them during normal usage I consider this acceptable.
This laptop uses the integrated Intel GMA 900 graphics card with up to 128 MB of shared video RAM. In general use for me this seemed to provide very acceptable performance, however if you are planning on playing games, you may want to pay particular attention that at this time the M55 is only offered with integrated graphics.

Speakers

At first glance the speakers on this laptop really stand out. A pair of harmon/kardon speakers sit directly below the screen providing a very interesting and rather slick look to the screen area. However these speakers aren't there just to look pretty and they don't disappoint. While not having a lot of bass to the sound, I found the sound quality good with ample volume. These are much better than the average tinny-sounding laptop speakers, but if you are an audiophile or looking for a lot of base you will still want external speakers.

Processor and Performance

The Toshiba Satellite M55-325 comes with an Intel Pentium M 740 (1.73GHz) processor. Add to that 512 MB of RAM and a 100 GB hard drive spinning at 5400 RPM and you would expect that this laptop should put up reasonably fast numbers for a thin and light laptop. Unfortunately at least from my perception this laptop was far from fast and I was slightly disappointed with the performance. However to be as objective as possible, I've included several benchmarks so everyone can evaluate the performance themselves.

Benchmarks

We use Super Pi (Super Pi download) to get a benchmark of processor speed. The Super Pi program simply forces the processor to calculate Pi to a selected number of digits of accuracy. Calculating to 2 million digits is our benchmark, below is how the Toshiba Satellite M55 stacked up against other laptops:

Notebook	Time to Calculate Pi to 2 Million Digits
Toshiba Satellite M55 (1.73GHz Alviso Pentium M)	1m 59s
IBM ThinkPad T43(1.86GHzAlviso Pentium M)	1m 45s
IBM ThinkPad T41 (1.6GHz Banias Pentium M)	2m 23s
Toshiba Satellite M60 (1.86GHz Alviso Pentium M)	1m 38s
Dell Inspiron 600m(1.6 GHz Dothan Pentium M)	2m 10s
Dell Inspiron 8600 (1.7GHz Banias Pentium M)	2m 28s

PCMark04 Scores:

[/TD]

Futuremark PCMark04 Scores
	IBM T43 (1.86GHz)	Toshiba Satellite M55(1.73GHz)
Multithreaded Test 1 / File Compression	3.33 MB/s	3.233MB/s
Multithreaded Test 1 / File Encryption	27.19 MB/s	25.295MB/s
Multithreaded Test 2 / File Decompression	23.4 MB/s	21.915MB/s
Multithreaded Test 2 / Image Processing	10.88 MPixels/s	10.116MPixels/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / Virus Scanning	1914.17 MB/s	1743.79MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / Grammar Check	2.82 KB/s	2.695 KB/s
File Decryption	54.11 MB/s	50.683 MB/s
Audio Conversion	2496.87 KB/s	2346.307 KB/s
Web Page Rendering	5.27 Pages/s	4.350Pages/s
DivX Video Compression	51.71 FPS	41.645FPS
Physics Calculation and 3D	159.19 FPS	84.263FPS
Graphics Memory - 64 Lines	868.44 FPS	364.855 FPS

HD Tune Benchmarks	Asus Z33a (5400 RPM)	Toshiba Satellite M55 (5400 RPM)
Minimum Transfer Rate	4.5MB/sec	20 MB/sec
Maximum Transfer Rate	30.2MB/sec	34.5 MB/sec
Average Transfer Rate	23.4 MB/sec	26.9MB/sec
Acess Time	24.1 ms	17.1 ms
Burst Rate	62.8 MB/sec	68.6 MB/sec
CPU Usage	-	3.7%

All benchmarks were run on A/C power so as not to be stepped down by the Intel Centrino power management.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The keyboard and touchpad are two of my main disappointments regarding this laptop. Upon the initial inspection of the keyboard I noticed the CTRL key was not fastened to the keyboard correctly and instead was tilted up on one side quite a bit. Attempts to snap it back flat to the keyboard were unsuccessful. When typing, the amount of flex exhibited by the keyboard resulted in uncomfortable typing and more importantly a large amount of noise. While my old laptop was barely audible when typing, this keyboard was so noisy that it prompted several complaints from across the room on the first evening of use.

My first impression of the touchpad was that it seems a bit undersized compared to most; the buttons appeared very small as well. When using the touchpad, it seems very temperamental. Sometimes it won't pick up my movement but then all of a sudden the pointer will shoot across the screen. I tried making adjustments to the pointer speed, but the behavior didn't improve. During general use, I found it frustrating to perform even the simplest tasks like moving to an icon on the desktop.

Ports and Inputs



Front: The front of the laptop has a volume dial, microphone and headphone jack, screen latch and wireless on/off switch and status lights.

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The left side of the laptop contains a PCMCIA Type II slot, multi-card reader (Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro, Smart Media, SD/MMC, and XD), S-video, i-Link (IEEE 1394), fan exhaust vent and VGA connection.

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The right side of the laptop has a DVD+/- DL burner and 2 USB ports.

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The back of the laptop has from left to right 2 USB ports, an Ethernet port, battery, AC connector, a security cable slot and the modem jack.

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The bottom view of the Toshiba Satellite M55.

Wireless

This laptop comes equipped with the Intel PRO/Wireless 2200 b/g wireless integrated, but no bluetooth. Almost all comparable laptops seem to offer at least the option of a Bluetooth configuration and I would have liked to have seen that option. The integrated wireless picked up my home wireless network instantly and easily with no configuration needed. It maintained a strong signal everywhere inside our house as well as on the outside patio.

Battery

The battery included with the Toshiba M55-325 is a 6-cell lithium ion battery. The fact that this is only a 6-cell battery is sure to somewhat limit the battery life compared to a larger heavier battery, but the benefit is that it keeps the overall weight down. With wireless on and surfing the Internet, I got 3 hours from the battery. For my usage pattern I consider this to be a nice compromise between battery life and weight. Battery Eater Pro results included below provide an independent evaluation of the battery life. (Toshiba states battery life is up to 3.52 hours)

Battery Eater Pro Results:

• Classic Mode800 x 600 x 321h 36m
• Idle ModeN/A2h 49m

Operating System and Software provided

The laptop came with Windows XP Home pre-loaded. As seems to be normal operating procedure the laptop came fully loaded -- with programs trying to get me to sign up for AOL, MSN, Napster and every other program or service you can think of. To restore all of this advertising if something should happen to your hard drive, Toshiba provides a recovery CD but not the original Windows disks. This was a disappointment to me but not a surprise, as very few manufacturers seem to provide more than a recovery disk.

Customer Support

I haven't yet had the opportunity to utilize the Toshiba customer support, so I can't speak to how easy they are to work with. The sales people at CompUSA were very nice and helpful, although I wish they were slightly more knowledgeable about the products. I always find it humorous when I know more about the products than the people trying to sell them to me, but it's to be expected from most of the big-box retailers.

Toshiba provides a fairly standard 1-year limited warranty on the M55. I also purchased an additional 2 years of accidental damage warranty from CompUSA. The $250.00 price tag for this again seems fairly normal. I'm not sure if the cost is necessarily worth it, but in any case if I spill my coffee on the keyboard I don't have to worry quite as much.

Pros

• Light-weight
• Nice compact size
• Great screen
• Runs relatively cool for a small(ish) laptop

Cons

• General build quality (thin plastic construction)
• Sub-par keyboard
• Touchpad and buttons

Conclusion

This laptop begins by offering everything I was looking for in a laptop: a great compromise between portability and screen size, a large hard drive, Pentium M processor, integrated wireless, cool temperatures and a DVD burner at well under 1500 USD. However it's the things that I wasn't looking for that plague this laptop. Poor construction shows up in numerous parts of the laptop, but none more noticeable than the keyboard. There are definitely enough positives that if Toshiba can correct the basic quality problems I experienced, this laptop would be a very nice thin and light laptop.

Pricing and Availability

 

Hey! This is from my review:

The Toshiba Satellite M55 delivers solid benchmarks right in the neighbourhood of similarly equipped units we have tested recently. Again, with no optimization, and all of the preloaded Toshiba utilities running in the background, I was able to grind out a respectable 1m 38s in Super Pi (Super Pi download) to two million iterations.

 

doh! don't be mad at the author, be mad at me, I edited this review and copied and pasted the wrong paragraph to introduce the Pi benchmark. It was 2 a.m. and my eyes were half shut, you'll have to forgive the editor. What I meant to use there was:

We use Super Pi (Super Pi download) to get a benchmark of processor speed. The Super Pi program simply forces the processor to calculate Pi to a selected number of digits of accuracy. Calculating to 2 million digits is our benchmark, below is how the Toshiba Satellite M55 stacked up against other laptops:

I changed this!

 

Seeing as how I was looking forward to this review, I am disappointed that the M55 came out of it looking like Rocky Balboa's face in the first Rocky movie, in other words, beaten to a bloody pulp.

I am looking at buying a notebook and this was the one which I decided to buy, however, after this review, I don't know, I may have to buy the M40 instead.

I have some questions for the author:

1) How much flex for the keyboard is acceptable flex?
2) The same question for the screen.
3) Have you noticed this build quality in other Toshibas? Particularly the M40?

Thanks for the info.

 

I'm not mad. I thought it was funny. Good review, but it bears out what I saw comparing Toshibas side to side at the store. The Libertto, M60, and Qosimo were leaps and bounds above the apparent quality if the 15 and 14 inch Satellites. Very flexy and plasticy in the keyboard and case construction.

 

I am wondering since the Tecra A5 is basically the same laptop if it too will suffer from the keyboard flex. I have played with the M55 and the keyboard flexs but not to the point where it would deter me away from buying the A5.

 

I was looking at buying an M55 at Circuit City last week and I had the same thoughts as the reviewer on the build quality and decided not to purchase it. The keyboard flex is terrible. If you put even a little pressure on the right side of the keyboard the whole side bends like a support post is missing under it. I thought maybe it was the display model so I checked out another one at Best Buy and it was exactly the same. It really is a shame, with discounts and rebates it would have been a great bargain. I also thought the screen while nice had a very small vertical sweetspot, much more so than the HP or Gateway screens I looked at but that could have just been me.

I ended up ordering an HP L2000 - I checked it out first at CompUSA and really liked it, especially the keyboard. Such a shame Toshiba blew it on this model. I think someone in the Toshiba forum got one of these recently and ended up returning it because of the same build issues.

 

Hey there, regarding the amount of flex in the keyboard I'm not sure there's really a good way to quantify it. I can say that it is the #1 reason I returned the laptop above and beyond the defective CTRL key. I guess I would say that it is slightly worse than some of the 15.4" Toshibas I've seen and much worse than the HP/Compaqs I've seen out there. As far as the screen, although I noticed the flex in the screen back I didn't think it was much different than most budget-type laptops. Not great but could be much worse. When I push on the back I would get some ripple in the screen but I think you will see that in most laptops in this price range.

 

I ordered the Tecra A5 and we'll see if it suffers from the same keyboard flex that the M55 does. I am hoping that the business line has an edge over the consumer line in quality. To be honest I think I can deal with the keyboard flex as long as the A5 stays cool and the fans don't kick on all the time, like the 2 HP's I had did.

 

smudge,
by any chance did you remove the keyboard to see why there was so much flex on the right side?
scott

 

Unfortunately since I was mulling over whether I was going to return it or not, I didn't want to offent the laptop gods by opening it up prior to returning it. Having said that, I've looked at a few more in stores when deciding whether to keep it or return it or exchange it and my personal opinion is that it is the design on these rather than a one time/defect issue.

 

Snoop - Love the Rocky Balboa reference. It wasn't my intention to bash the laptop quite that bad and I do think there are some very good things about it but I just couldn't handle it myself. I have a hard time thinking that my old Compaq Armada V300 has spoiled me, but maybe that's what happened

 

While yours has been the only "full" review that I've seen so far for the M50/M55, I have found other people who have bought it and have had nothing but praise for it and don't mind the keyboard flex and in fact thought that the flex wasn't that bad compared to other notebooks they've either owned or tried.

So the debate continues. I have until probably the middle of August to finally make up my mind. Thanks for your review and feedback.

 

I ordered the A5 which is the business version of the M55/M50 and I'll post how the keyboard flex is compared to the M55 I have seen in person. I am hoping if the flex is bad that I'll be able to figure out what to do to solve the issue.

Scott

 

Snoop - I encourage you to check it out in a store nearby. Should be able to find it in a BestBuy or CompUSA fairly easily. Like I said in the review, there's a lot that's good with this laptop regarding features and running temp. if you can stand the keyboard. That will be the 1 million dollar question so best to try it yourself if possible.

 

I was wondering if you could post a picture of the ac adapter
Im thinking about getting the m50 but I cant find any reviews on it. Is the m55 the same thing as the m50? Im in Canada so I am getting the Pentium M. Im not a gamer. Just a regular comp user for general comp purposes. Would you recommend this m50/m55 computer or would you recommend staying away from it completly? I was also wondering what keyboard flex was
Thanks so much for the review!

 

Thanks a lot for your review, that was real close. I'm suppose to buy one at Circuit City tomorrow for $1,399 w/ a $250 discount.

Whew! Now I need to go back on my three other choices> Gateway 6520Z AKA Gateway M360, Toshiba M45-S265, or Thinkpad T43. I'm not really sure about buying Toshiba now. If I do, I probably buy the Tecra series.

I have one question about Toshiba laptops though. How come Consumer Reports magazine rates Toshiba products as the least problematic PC's & laptops? They rank #1 and above Apple (September 2005 issue).

I'd appreciate if someone can give me some feedback on my three other choices.

Much oblige to you Smudge.

 

As discussed, the keyboard has some flex. mine was particularly BAD.
the keys on the right side of the keyboard (pgUp, pgDn, End, Home, <-, ->) were incredibly noisy. this was obviously a bad keyboard.

i had it serviced and the technician replaced the keyboard at no charge.

the new keyboard is sooooo much better. there is still some flex on the keyboard towards the right side. i've had sony, dell and HP laptops before and they all had some flex in the keyboards, some better, some worse, so this does not bother me.

i was able to see what was underneath the keyboard, and there was nothing in particular that supports that portion of the keyboard.

if you hold down the blank space below the End key, all the flexing on the right portion of the keyboard will be eliminated.

seems like toshiba needed to put some support under this part of the keyboard, like a thin piece of double sided sticky tape.

otherwise, this is a great laptop. nice screen, fast, large hard drive 5400 rpm.

 

Smudge,
Good review but I just bought a M55-s325 for $950 out the door at Office Depot, and so far I'm really impressed. The keyboard may flex a little, but types just fine. Yes the mouse pad is a bit squirley, and definitely to close to the keyboard because I've accidently hit it several times with my thumbs while typing, but thats no biggy.Other than that, it really seems to have been a great buy. The speakers are crisp and loud, the screan is brilliant, and its super light. I got lucky and am "borrowing" a neighbors wireless signal, which the computer picked up immediately. I'm really excited to try the DVD burner, which came standard with the cpu. Overall its still early, I've only had it a day, but so far so good!

 

Congrats on your new notebook!

Glad to hear that you are more than satisfied with it, that's always a good thing. Be sure to post back and let us know your other impressions.

 

Hi I bought the M55, and am pretty please with it. An excellent performer and manages to be quite a head-turner, courtesy of the beautiful teal cover. One quib i have abt this is the screen : it appears abit washed out, and hard to read compared to other laptops. Maybe its the glossy screen that reflects any light shone on it. Does anybody have the same problem, or any solution to this.
I used it yest wid a projector and the image quality was beaten by a 2 year old ASUS laptop wid a 15" screen..i dun get it

 

ok... so i find this forum 4 hours AFTER buying the M50-MX5 from futureshop (FS) for 1499CDN. I am in Canada btw. Oh well let's get cracking, I have a month to return it if you guys manage to change my mind. I have many questions and would greatly appreciate this forum's collective advice. This is my very first laptop.

I wanted a smaller one, so 14 inch sounded great even though FS had the 15 inch for a hundred cheaper but it also had the 740 chip, whereas i have the 750. I've noticed you guys with the M55 have the 740, wonder why mine's 750? Also, as part of the deal, FS installed a free extra 512 of ram, giving my 1gig of ddr2.

I just ran downstairs to see what this flex issue is and i have no clue. I haven't felt up that many laptops but this keyboard seems firm and inplace. Also, i don't see how the build is weak, it is plastic but then again, i have yet to see a laptop made of metal.

The video aspect troubles me though. I haven't played a game in years due to lack of system capabilities. This laptop is powerful everywhere but in the video. Most new games list a 3d card as their first requirement. This intel 900, is it that bad??? Will this system be albe to run the latest games like Doom 3 or ... gosh i dont even know whats out there. I'm not that much into gaming, but the option would be nice.
Another question that stems from that is, what kinda of expansion slots are inside this thing? Could i get a video card?

Overall, i think i made the right decision in that i have a laptop 4 times more powerful then my P3 home pc. 1.86 centrino with a gig or ram sounds like a beast to me.
One thing i really want to know though, asap, is how do i clean this thing, what do i need to keep and what can go? I want to get rid of aol and anyother type of garbage like that, but also i want to install firefox and delete explorer, delete norton antivirus for AVG and so forth. How much of the added features can i safely strip away? Like toshiba software, can that go? What are the advantages of formating and installing XP PRO? Why the heck are there so many icons in my task bar and so many processes running in my task manager? I need better control over my system resources. It was surprising to see so many things running on a bare system.

Feel free to take a stab at any of these questions, or redirect my queries to another thread, hopefully i have added to the dicussion. And hopefully within a month, i'll either be more confident with my purchase, or looking into another laptop purchase.
I will be posted frequent updates here as my experience progresses.

 

I just used an M55 display model at Costco yesterday and found none of the build quality problems like the keyboard flexing that the reviewer mentioned. I found the quality to be quite good and I loved the screen on it, its quite brighter and crisper than the one on my HP DV4000! I just found the touchpad a little too small for my tastes, and I've seen many smaller notebooks with larger touchpads so thats a shame.

 

Well, everybody has different experiences...

I saw the M55 and the M40 at Best Buy the other day - very poor build quality in my opinion - at least compared to mine.