Toshiba Satellite C50-B-IIL

Toshiba will exhibit a few, which introduces new models such as the stylish Ultrabook Kira, and thoroughly over-the-top 4K P50 laptop showing it. However, the company still has a tendency to focus most of its efforts on what is called the 'value' end of the market, and its new C50 is a good budget laptop for anyone with a really tight budget. (See also: 20 best budget laptop 2014)

The prices for the C50 range start at £ 229 for just one model with Celeron processor, but even with this top-of-the-range C50-B-IIL is in at just under £ 350 a i3 processor running at 1.8GHz, 4GB memory and 750GB hard disk. That is a decent specifications for a laptop in this price range, even the Ivy Bridge i3 TurboBoost is no option to improve performance. 2160 marks its points of general-purpose PCMark 7 is not bad at all for an i3 back-up only by a 5400rpm hard drive. The Home and Work Suites in PCMark scores also produced 8-entry level 1883 and 2240 points respectively. But, to be fair, we've seen similar marks from other budget laptop worth £ 100 more than this, so the C50 is performing quite respectably for a laptop in this price range.

It is not speed demon, of course, but when Windows 8 starts fast boot option screen C50 Start with a fairly easy 20 seconds. We pleased to see that it is ready to start the launch of the application immediately, with no thumb-twiddling or cursor-rotating while it got itself together well. Manage the routine web browsing and working with Microsoft Office perfect as well, so it gets all the basics right for a budget laptop.

In fact, there are some obvious signs of compromise on the C50 at all. The resolution of 1366x768 is perfectly acceptable at this price, and the 15.6-inch display provides a clear and detailed images that have worked well in our testing streaming video. The horizontal viewing angle very respectable - close to 150 degrees - with only weakness being more limited vertical viewing angle. The screen brightness falls off very quickly even when you push it again just a few inches, so you may need to nudge the screen occasionally to improve visibility. The speakers are also a bit of a disappointment, sound very thin and lifeless, so you'll want to use a set of headphones or external speakers for listening to music.

Build quality is pretty good, though. The plastic case has a bit of a cheap-and-cheerful feel to it, but it looks strong enough to cope with life in a backpack. It does not break your back either, as Toshiba has managed to reduce the weight of C50 in just 2.2kg. That is well below average for a 15-inch laptop with a built-in DVD drive, so you should be able to carry it down to a coffee shop for a spot of wifi browsing without too much trouble.

The C50 even managed fairly respectable battery life. We do not expect its Ivy Bridge processor takes a long time, but it actually only managed to nudge past 5.5 hours (333 minutes) in our test streaming video, so you should easily get six hours or more if you are not using wifi all the time. The only thing it can not really handle 3D gaming, because the government can only C50 21fps when running our casual gaming test Stalker 1366x768 resolution.