Toshiba Satellite U840W review

The keyboard is our major area of concern, with noticeable flex in the keyboard and keys that are often completely unresponsive, such as the right side of the space bar. The backlit Chiclet-style keys are easy to spot in the dark, but they aren’t very comfortable to type on, as they lack any tactile feedback and have very little travel or bounce.

We felt the touchpad could be better, too. It’s not particularly sensitive, often struggling to pick up tap-to-click motions unless to stick to the upper left corner of the pad. It certainly would have benefited from using the same 21:9 aspect ratio as the screen, although the default sensitivity means you can still span the desktop in one swipe. There’s no noticeable dead zone between the two touchpad buttons, which were surprisingly good for a touchpad integrated design.

As you would expect, performance is in line with almost every other Intel Ivy Bridge Ultrabook. The dual-core i5-3317U runs at 1.77GHz and can Turbo Boost up to 2.6, there’s 6GB of available RAM and the 500GB hard disk is paired with a 32GB caching SSD for faster boot and sleep times. Scoring 43 overall in our multimedia benchmarks, it’s about on par with the competition.

Graphics performance was a little underwhelming, even for Intel’s integrated HD 4000 GPU – it managed only 12.9fps in our Dirt 3 benchmark. At least battery life was a respectable seven and a half hours, meaning you’ll get most of a full working day out of a single charge if you stick to light tasks.

At first glance, the Satellite U840W seems like it’s best for films with its 21:9 display, but in reality with no Blu-ray player and lots of films not shot in 21:9 that’s a bit misleading. However, the high resolution screen is brilliant for working on Windows applications and the price is attractive. Only the keyboard and touchpad detract from it. If the size isn’t so important, the HP Envy 6 is a better all-round laptop.