Happy Birthday to me! Being gifted a laptop - now what do I get?

If that's as high as your budget allows then it'll probably be okay. Some points.

1. It has a terrible screen. Very low resolution for the size and not at all good quality with terrible viewing angles. I would go with 1080 as a minimum for a 17"

2. It has 'only' 8GB of RAM. This will be okay for now but you'll wish you had more at times and when it's time to upgrade to 16GB you'll have to sell that 8GB to make room.

3. No dedicated GPU (Graphics card). So there is zero possibility of getting good GPU performance from it and certainly no chance of upgrading this aspect (Upgradable GPUs are very VERY rare on laptops)

4. No SSD so you're relying on a slow HDD

5. It's very big, very heavy.

6. The keyboard & touchpad are not centred on the screen, some will be okay with this - others not so.

7. It has a not very good keyboard.

In summary it's a reasonably good but 'average' laptop. Nothing amazing but then it's not expensive and at the end of the day you get what you pay for. My laptop cost more than four times the cost of this Toshiba so I wouldn't be happy with the Toshiba to replace it but that doesn't mean it's a 'bad' laptop.

If I had a <$800 budget I certainly wouldn't rule this machine out. I've had a couple of Toshiba's in the past and the one I've kept in my collection (A pocket sized windows 95 libretto) is still running fine to this day.

So in conclusion, it's not as good as my retina macbook but a machine that'll do you fine if you're not too fussy or demanding (I am - sorry)