![]() All in all, I’ve been very happy with the battery life so far. It’s funny to get a low battery warning only to see that there’s still about an hour’s worth of juice left. I’ve consistently been able to average about four hours with moderate usage. It’s 1.5 inches at the back and 1 inch at the front.Īs previously mentioned, battery life is pretty good. Finally, while the MacBook is uniformly shaped, the Vaio is more of a wedge design. It’s a lot easier to lift and/or carry in one hand than a MacBook and the ultra thin screen is truly remarkable. For all intents and purposes, it’s roughly the size of a MacBook minus an entire pound. That being said, at about four pounds, this notebook isn’t a pain to schlep around at all. ![]() I initially had my heart set on a less-than-three-pound notebook and, having owned a couple in my day, can tell you that there’s a big psychological difference between three and four pounds. Also, I realize that using the Vista Experience rating isn’t the most thorough benchmark in the world but I thought I’d include it in order to show the difference between the two video cards. This is to enable the computer to use the Intel and NVIDIA chipsets separately depending on the chosen settings. Unfortunately, switching between the speed and stamina modes requires a restart each time. There’s 2GB of PC2-5300 system RAM, standard. The Intel X3100 setting uses up to 358MB of shared memory and the NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS uses up to 831MB. The battery life got cut in half, which wasn’t a big deal because, again, the laptop is generally plugged in. I now have the laptop on this setting when it sits on my desk during the day or any time I want to play games. I was able to run Halo 2, Tiger Woods 2008, and a few other new-ish games without any problems whatsoever. Everything seemed to clip along a bit faster and the gaming graphics subscore jumped to 4.6 thanks to the NVIDIA chipset that gets used instead of the Intel one. When I finally did try out the speed setting, I was even more impressed. I’d actually been using this setting for the entire first week without trying out the speed setting because everything had been humming along just fine. The stamina setting makes the notebook run impressively quick and nimble despite ratcheting some settings down a bit to conserve battery life. This mode uses the onboard Intel graphics processor to conserve power, which returns a 3.5 point gaming graphics score under Vista’s Experience Index. I can eke out Sony’s advertised six hours if I turn off the WiFi and Bluetooth radios and dim the screen down a fair amount. When I’m away from my desk I have it set to stamina, which gets me around 4 hours of battery life under moderate use. The best feature of this notebook, in my opinion, is the ability to flip back and forth between "stamina" and "speed" modes via a hardware switch above the keyboard. I knew going in that I’d have to remove all this stuff but were I a regular business user who purchased this notebook, I would have been a little curious as to why my computer was running so slowly and a little furious about all the intermittent pop-ups and system messages asking me to pay for stuff. Read any other review of a Sony notebook that’s been released recently and you’ll read the same thing. I spent over an hour uninstalling Norton Internet Security, Spy Something-or-Other, AOL, Napster, Microsoft Office Trial, a full version of Spiderman 3 that you can’t watch unless you pay to unlock it, and a whole bunch of other trial software. ![]() ![]() Big enough that it slows the computer down considerably. The preloaded software on the newer Sony laptops is a big problem. That little silver thing in the middle tray there is a memory card reader that slides into the ExpressCard slot. Pretty average unboxing, not that I was expecting to trip over my couch. The MSRP on this notebook is currently $2049 but I was able to pick one up on sale at Best Buy for $1899. – Integrated webcam, biometric fingerprint reader, DVD±RW/-RAM drive – 160GB SATA hybrid hard drive (5400rpm) with 256mb of non-volatile memory – Hybrid graphics system (Mobile Intel X3100 and NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS) – Weighs 3.95 pounds, carbon fiber casing, long battery life – 13.3" widescreen (1280×800) display with XBRITE and white LED backlight – Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7500 (2.2GHz, 4MB L2 cache, 800MHz FSB) Looks good so far, but how does it perform? I picked up the VGN-SZ650N/C model, which features a 13.3" screen, carbon fiber casing, long battery life, dual graphics cards, and a hybrid hard drive with 256mb of built-in flash memory. The VAIO SZ6 series is a relatively new addition to Sony’s notebook line.
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