Toshiba Radius 11 - Opinions?

GordonR on 19/10/2015 - 00:46

My 9-year old daughter has decided she wants her very own laptop (for Christmas).

She will mostly use it for Minecraft, You Tube, Word, PowerPoint and general (supervised) browsing.

I only use Mac and Linux machines, but buying her a new MacBook Air is overkill, and as she's said she wants to get something new for once (younger child), that puts us in the cheap Windows laptop category about which I know nothing.

She'll kick in $200 of her savings and I'll match it and add a bit, so we're looking around $500.

I'd rather avoid the bulky black behemoths with 15" screens and spinning hard drives, but obviously can't go to the sleekest of ultra books in this range.

A confusing hour on Google and this forum has thrown up this Toshiba Radius, on sale for a bit over $500 at JB.

https://www.jbhifi.com.au/computers-tablets/laptops/toshiba/…

Any opinions on the strong and weak points of this machine?

Computing

Comments

  • pinchies on 19/10/2015 - 03:40

    Looks like an good machine – "well balanced" and "good compromise" is how I would describe it. Biggest downside I can see is that the 64GB hdd is very small, and is an eMMC - not as fast as an SSD, but at least it will mean the machine will still be quite responsive. I would consider these as alternatives:

    http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/131584230280

    http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/181723540043

    http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/171959975811

  • iridiumstem on 19/10/2015 - 04:03

    Hmmm, I personally believe that laptops usually shouldn't be judged by the paper spec (i.e. how much it throttles and build quality is two of the important things that you'd not be able to read on paper). On paper, it looks reasonable, that said I'd probably look at it in real life before making any judgment. I'd assume that real life experiences with the device was what you wanted to hear from us.

  • tonyjzx on 19/10/2015 - 09:52

    that looks fine to me for what they're expected to do

  • GordonR on 19/10/2015 - 17:00

    OK, another possibility - Inspiron 11 3000

    http://www.dell.com/au/p/inspiron-11-3147-laptop/pd

    I've given up the tiny not-proper SSD for a decent size spinning disk, and the unit gets quite good reviews.

    But what is the Celeron processor?

    It seems much newer than the i3 that some earlier configurations of this model came out, but also much cheaper. I can't find out about its performance because I am just led to infinitely many automated "compare this chip to that chip" websites which show me hundreds of graphs, but never tell me whether the longer bar is better (more frames per second) or whether the shorter bar is better (less time for the task).

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