Laptops Arena

Sony laptop reviews are somewhat difficult to write because we can't all be objective. If you own a Sony laptop you will always be tempted to say it's the best choice ever firstly because you pay a lot of money for specs which are not top of the line (and you'll never admit you made a bad choice) and secondly because it's a Sony and Sony is the brand or "cool" people.

For this Sony laptop review, we have chosen a $2150 unit: the VAIO FW (vgn-fw198u to be more exact). It has a 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T9400, 4 GB of RAM (of which only 3 are usable), 320 GB of storage space and the ATI Mobility Radeon 3470 graphics card with 256 MB of video memory. The design of the notebook is really nice. It's all silver and shiny it almost looks like a diamond. The built in quality is very nice and the chassis is rigid and sturdy. The screen is very thin and it makes movie watching quite comfortable and pleasant. The colors are rich and sharp even if the contrast is a bit washed out. Both the horizontal and vertical viewing angles are nice. The keyboard seems a bit too "Apple Mac Book" and it seems like it's been copied. But apparently Sony was the first manufacturer to develop this type of keyboard, with significant spacing between the keys.

It takes some time to adjust to this type of keyboard with flat keys and spaces but once you do get past the differences you are going to love typing on this Sony. The touchpad is larger than you could imagine which makes wide motion comfortable. The left and right mouse buttons are leveled with the rest of the palm rest area just like in the case of most Toshiba Satellite laptops.



When it comes to the ports and features of this laptop, we have a total of 3 USB ports, one Express Card slot, one memory stick reader, one Ethernet port, one HDMI port, one VGA port, one SD card reader, a FireWire port and the headphone and microphone jacks. The speakers of this laptop are weaker than we all expected. If you turn up the volume to a maximum level, it is still not enough to fully enjoy a game or watch a good movie. This can be a huge disappointment for a multimedia notebook if you consider there are cheaper multimedia laptops which have better sound qualities.

External speakers are recommended and maybe a good set of headphones too. When it comes to battery life, there is nothing great for this laptop to brag about here either. If the power management profile of the operating system is set to "balance mode", the screen brightness is set to a medium level that will give you about 2 hours and 40 minutes of battery life. Imagine that if you're on the road and maybe want to enjoy a Blu-ray movie on this laptop, there is a good chance you won't be able to see the whole movie until the laptop shuts down. This is quite disappointing and we expected more from Sony. If you ever come across the possibility of getting a bigger and better battery, make sure you do so.





If you plan on using this laptop with any 3D application, you certainly won't be satisfied with the performance. For a laptop in the office and basic computer needs, this VAIO works just fine. When you try to play some new games, you get lousy frame rates so give up the idea that you could play some very fancy game on this unit. Aside from watching Blu-ray movies and clips, there is not much to say about the video performance of this laptop. Remember that you pay over $2000 for this unit and for such a high price tag, better performance is often expected.





This laptop can prove to be uncomfortable if you use it on your lap for over an hour as your legs are most likely to begin sweating. There is no noise coming from the fan unless the laptop is really stressed out and pushed to its maximum limits. Therefore, the fan doesn't produce any disturbing noise and some of you may not hear it at all if you are using the laptop in an environment where there already is some background noise. Aside from the great design and the Blu-ray optical drive which is always a nice touch in any laptop, I can't find anything amazing that would determine me to recommend this laptop to other people.

The screen has uneven back lights, performance is ok but we still expect more from a $2000 laptop, the battery life is poor and the speakers are awful. This is not what you expect from a multimedia notebook, which is supposed to be all about watching movies and listening to music. If I had to grade it from 1 to a maximum 10, I would give it a 6.5, maximum 7. On the other hand, the design is nice and so is the built in quality as this laptop seems really solid.





The keyboard is very pleasant to type on once you get used to the layout of the keys. Even if the widescreen is nice for watching movies, this does not compensate for the back light problem so hopefully it's a factory problem which is only happening with a few units.





Now, the decision is all up to you. Try reading some customer reviews and see if the laptop was really worth paying the price because I'm reading here about too many flaws for such an expensive laptop. In the end, like I always say, an important percentage of the price that you pay for the notebook actually represents the brand. It doesn't matter if you are buying a $2000 laptop which is good or not, in the end all that matters is that you'll own a Sony VAIO.