Posted by Ronan on Dec 2, 2008 in technology | 4 comments
I’ve had Dell laptops pretty much from day 1. I like Dell, you get value for money but Dell machines were never the prettiest of laptops. Recently I got my light as a feather (1.9kg) stunning Sony Vaio laptop.
The first thing you notice on picking up the laptop is that it’s light but yet very sturdy – it’s not made with flimsy plastic (which I often felt Dell laptops were ). Opening the lid you noticed something borrowed from Apple. It has a mac’esq keyboard which I love – I suffer from stubbyfingeritis which means I mash and bash most keyboards. Not so with the Sony. The keys are very well spaced out and I haven’t hit a wrong key yet!!
The screen is insanely thin – but with metal back it feels solid and cool to the touch. There is no catch or lock for the screen – it simply closes and stays closed. With a 13.3inch widescreen it’s plenty big for most things.
The mouse pad is sweet – although I would like the mouse buttons to ‘clunk’ a little less. The fingerprint reader works well and can double up as a means of scrolling through pages – although the mouse pad has the right hand side and bottom edge as a scroll bar so I don’t use the fingerprint reader much.
The motion eye camera and inbuilt microphone is clear with skype/gtalk – people haven’t notice much of difference.
The one thing I love is the eery green power button in the hinge – very cool..very distinctive.
- it flashes orange when the lid is closed or in standby.
Elsewhere around the chassis it has the usual wifi on/off switch, SD flash card reader, pro magic reader, 2 usb ports, vga out (no digital out – booo), headphone & external mic, modem and ethernet port (hidden behind a plastic cover!)
Software:
It comes with Vista Business and it runs fine but I’d rather XP over Vista any day. Also bundled is Adobe Acrobat 8 which would normally cost 200 euros. You get a trial of 60 days of office which is more annoying than helpful. But even more annoying than office is mcafee antivirus. I hate mcafee so it was the first thing to be removed.. how can Mcafee consistently produce software that cripples every machine?? I was happy to find out there was no real other bloatware apart from mcaffe.
The only downside I’ve had with the laptop is I keep pressing the cd eject button when I pick it up – this should have been a slotin CD type drive.
All in all a super laptop. 4.5/5 stars!
Oooohhh Shiny,
I wouldn’t get too excited about acrobat 8. I’m sure it’s even more unstable under vista than XP. It doesn’t really get along with IE7.
Sonys are far more stylish than the grey dell box equivalent. There is a bit of a premium to be paid for the style though, unless you got a good deal somewhere…….
yah for sure it cost’s a little extra. But in saying that, I noticed laptopsdirect.ie doing a good deal on it – coming in around the same price you’d expect to pay for a Mac or Dell XPS (equivalent spec).
Ronan,
Hows it going? long time no see (i take it this is THEE Ronan Skitz Skehill of St. Raphaels fame?). Hows life with ya? happy christmas and all that mallarkey hope you have a good one. I look forward to reading a reply from you in the NEAR future.
Slan go phoil
Hi Anthony,
There can be only one Ronan Skehill!
Email is on the way!
R