Sony Vaio NW Review

[bounci.rabbit.123]

Sony Vaio NW Review

The Sony Vaio NW is a 15.5” widescreen notebook recently released onto the market. It’s a budget machine, but you get a big bang for your buck. Currently, there is not a Configure-to-Order option available; you have to select from preconfigured machines. Nonetheless, all the current configurations offer just about as much processing power as a relatively demanding user would want, with Intel Core 2 Duo processors, option for discrete graphics, etc. Consumers looking for an inexpensive 15” notebook with great features should give this a serious look, although those that require lengthy battery times might be turned off. In general though, this is a great multimedia machine.

There are several preconfigured options available on sonystyle.com, and other configs are available in retail stores such as Best Buy and Staples. Retail stores usually have cheaper versions but they come with integrated graphics, whereas online the configurations offered all have ATI discrete graphics.

My configuration:

Intel Core 2 Duo P7350 2.0GHz, 3MB L2 cache, FSB 1066MHz (Centrino 2)
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit (a free upgrade to Windows 7 is available)
Splashtop Linux Browser for Instant-On access to the web
15.5” 1366x768 glossy widescreen display (WXGA)
0.3MP MotionEye webcam and built-in microphone
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570 Graphics (512MB)
Blu-Ray ROM/DVD-RW/CD-RW, Dual Layer
4GB DDR2 RAM, 800MHz
400GB 5,400rpm HDD
Intel 5100 AGN WiFi
Gigabit Ethernet
Dimensions: 14.6” x 1.2” x 9.8”
6-cell battery (an extended battery is available separately)
5.8lbs
Price: $999.99

A cheaper configuration is available at $849.99, but you’ll forgo the Blu-Ray drive and the Centrino 2 processor, and you get a smaller hard drive.

Build Quality and Design:





Sony has adopted a unique design for this notebook, etching a wood-like texture into the plastic casing. The effect is a ripply, wavy appearance. Some people might be turned off by this design, but I am not bothered by it, and in addition, this design resists fingerprints. In addition, this pattern is only visible from up close; stand a few meters away and most people could never tell. There are three color options, but my configuration only comes in birch white; other configurations will give you walnut brown, birch white, and silver rattan.

The lid is latchless and is held closed by hidden magnets, which work well and hold the lid firmly closed. The notebook requires two hands to open. The keyboard sits in a small depression, slightly below the level of the palmrest and speakers. This makes for a more ergonomical typing experience. Also, the entire palmrest section of the notebook is slimmer than the rest – the bottom slopes away at the keyboard where the CPU, GPU, and other components are housed. The best way to understand this is to see a picture of it – see the picture of the underside below.

Sony advertises that the chassis is constructed from recycled plastics. I’m not so sure that it’s a smart idea to make that one of the notebook’s selling points, but I have no qualm about the durability of the notebook. The keyboard trim and palmrest all show slight flex under pressure, and for normal use you won’t notice any of it. The screen bezel is probably the weakest part – it just isn’t even close to being stiff, and pressing it down can cause slight ripples in the screen. The lid itself flexes too, both vertically and when applying torsion. However, it does not cause any ripples either, and contrary to popular belief, some flex is good as it protects the screen from shattering if you drop it. The area under the optical drive also flexes, but this is common for many notebooks nowadays. Other parts on the bottom are quite firm. In conclusion, the build quality can’t match that of the Macbook Pros, but few notebooks can, and for a plastic notebook it is quite good.

Sony makes it easy to upgrade common components in the notebook. The hard drive is located directly underneath the right palmrest (see lower left of the picture below), and there is a dedicated cover for that which only required two screws to be removed to replace the hard drive (I just replaced mine two days ago). RAM is also easy to upgrade – I believe that it is housed in the center compartment, but as I haven’t opened it up I can’t be sure. As Sony included 4GB of RAM, you probably won’t ever need to add more RAM. The computer does support DDR3 RAM due to the FSB speed of the processor, but in practice you won’t feel a huge difference.



Screen and Speakers

The 1366x768 widescreen is decent. I am no expert when judging colors, contrasts, etc., but I saw no major problem with the screen, and I bet that most people won’t either. The screen can get plenty bright and very low too, so there is a setting for everyone. However, there are only 8 different brightness settings – you don’t get the 0-100% options that many monitors now include. 8 should be sufficient for most people though. One great thing about this notebook is the “Display Off” button, which allows you to shut off the display whenever you want to save power and/or battery. Viewing angles are fairly good.. There’s no problem viewing straight on, but the screen begins to blur at around 45 degrees and color inversion kicks in at 70-80 degrees. Viewing angles depend heavily on whatever color the display is showing, so for example, while editing this post, someone sitting next to me could easily see what I'm doing, but not as much so when I'm watching a movie in a dark scene.The display uses Sony’s X-Brite Eco technology, which is supposed to save battery life by (quoting LaptopMag) “using one backlight instead of two”.

Speakers are OK. They don’t get that loud and there is a complete lack of bass. Loud sounds are rather tinny, although I did not hear any distortion. Sound is very clear though. I would definitely recommend a set of headphones for watching movies, as that would save battery life too. For basic internet videos though, the speakers will suffice. There is a Mute button located above the keyboard too, but no touch sensitive media controls. Volume controls are mapped as Fn secondary commands above the F3 and F4 keys.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The keyboard is excellent. I have never used an isolation (chiclet) style keyboard much before, but I definitely like it. Spacing is great and key travel is deep. The keyboard is very comfortable and also very quiet – nothing like the clacky Dell keyboards I’ve been used to using. The Fn key is thankfully located to the right of the Control key. There are also dedicated Page Up/Down, Home, and End keys. Keyboard flex is virtually nonexistent.

The touchpad has a textured surface and it is quite comfortable to use, although at first I found that my fingers would sometimes stop moving due to the friction caused by the raised bumps. I got used to it though, and then I had no problem. The right and bottom sides are scroll regions (they aren’t marked on the touchpad), and if you’d like, you can turn them off in the touchpad settings. That’s probably why it isn’t marked. The left side can be used as a zoom function, but you already have zoom keys mapped to secondary functions. There is no built in multitouch function, but in Windows, you don’t really have much use for it anyways.

Less good things can be said about the touchpad buttons. They are stiff and offer shallow throw – they require a bit of effort to push down, although it’s not entirely uncomfortable. On the other hand, they are big and easy to locate. Sony even made these keys raised above the surface of the touchpad, a nice design touch.

Ports

Port selection is decent on this machine. You get three USB ports, VGA, HDMI (only with ATI graphics), ExpressCard/34, Firewire 400(I think it’s 400), Gigabit Ethernet, Kensington lock slot, headphone jack, and microphone jack. There is also an SD card and a MagicGate Pro media card reader. The wireless on/off switch is located at the front of the notebook. Because of the way the screen opens, there are no ports on the back. Disappointingly, there is no eSATA port, something that is becoming increasingly common to notebooks nowadays. I also wish there were more USB ports, though admittedly, it would have been tough for Sony to fit in another one.

Left side:
DC-in, heat vent, VGA, HDMI, Firewire 400, USB, ExpressCard/34



Front:
WiFi switch, SD card and a MagicGate Pro media card reader, power/charging/busy lights



Right side:
Kensington lock slot, optical drive, two USB, headphone, microphone.



Performance:

System performance was excellent thanks to the Intel Centrino 2 processor and ATI graphics. This system should be capable of handling any multimedia task the user throws at it, with the exception of high-end 3D games. It took about 65 seconds to boot into Vista, although full control of the desktop didn’t arrive for another 30 seconds or so. The 400GB hard drive too is very speedy, running at 5,400rpm.

One thing I hate about Sony notebooks is the abundance of trialware and bloatware that Sony insists on preinstalling. They aren’t entirely truthful with telling you what they load either – apart from the usual Norton, Office, etc., they loaded nearly 40 other Sony applications too that the Control Panel didn’t see. Many of these were useless, such as DVD makers, slideshow makers, MusicBox, and tons of auxiliary programs for these programs. I happened across these as I was trying to uninstall something called “Application Manager for Vaio”, which actually turned out to be an uninstaller itself! Here, I uninstalled about 30 of the applications listed and kept about 10 that I thought I might need. Many of these were also set to start on startup, increasing boot times.

I downloaded some benchmarks and ran them on this computer.

PCMark Vantage: 3650
3DMark06: 4130
3DMark Vantage: This one was strange – from the main menu it told me that the minimum resolution was not supported and would not run. Then I ran it from the Options menu, and the test did complete, but it gave me N/A for the 3DMark score. Hmph. However, there were two other scores that might mean something to you guys. CPU test: 3874, and GPU test: 1184.

In my initial review, I didn't delve much into games because I didn't really game much, but that has changed significantly. I've played many games now on this laptop, and with the exception of Crysis, this laptop has not disappointed me. Call of Duty MW1, MW2, and WaW run very well at 1024x768 with medium settings, around 30-40 fps average (it dips below 25 at some times but not often). Bioshock runs at native resolution, max settings without any lag. Crysis runs well at 1024x720 (maybe 768...i don't remember) at all low to medium settings. In other words, this computer will more than suffice for casual gamers that don't expect every pixel.

Clearly, this system performs very well, and most users will not find reason to complain about performance, even with Vista (which, by the way, I like much better than XP). In addition, when Windows 7 is released, I expect the system to be even snappier. It’s great that Sony offers a free upgrade to Windows 7. I have already ordered mine.

Instant-On OS:

The Splashtop Linux instant-on OS boots in about 10 seconds, which is very snappy and certainly useful for quickly checking email. It only has an internet browser, and you cannot access your hard drive, but for checking email it will suffice. I saw no problems rendering webpages – the interface was somewhat similar to Firefox. Moreover, if you really need to type up a document, you can always use Google Docs – they work fine in this OS. The touchpad and buttons work fine in general too, but the scroll areas are finicky and hard to control. I recommend using the Page Up/Down keys or the arrow keys for scrolling.

It can save your WiFi configuration settings so you don’t have to enter a password each time you want to get online. There are a decent number of options that you can set for yourself too.

Heat and Noise:

The system does a decent job of managing heat. The palmrests got slightly warm after light usage (or maybe it was just my hand that got warm haha), but the keyboard and touchpad remained cool during normal usage (web browsing, document editing, etc). The hottest areas were the heat vent, the area directly beneath the heat vent, and the vent located in the center of the bottom of the notebook. In those conditions, it became impossible to use the notebook as a laptop, but the only times you would face temperatures like that would be running benchmarks or playing games. In general, the left side of the notebook gets warm/hot, but the right side stays very cool. Movie playback did make the system warmer, but it wasn’t too bad. I don’t have a thermometer to measure external temperatures, but heat should not be an issue for this computer and definitely not a deal breaker, although I would prefer less heat on the left side.

The computer did produce noise though. It was quiet noise but noise nonetheless. The CPU fans were usually on and you could hear them as a quiet lull underneath the keyboard. There is also a strange high pitched buzzing that is emitted from the computer, and while I’ve heard of this noise before in other computers, I could never pinpoint the source. It’s certainly not a problem with the computer itself, but it does get a little irritating after awhile. If you’re typing a document, watching a video, or playing a game, you most likely won’t notice as the other sounds coming from your computer will definitely mask it. I will investigate this problem and see if there is a fix or remedy. The optical drive wasn’t the quietest either – you can definitely hear the CD whirring and spinning. Under load, the main fan is also very quiet – when running benchmarks after benchmarks, the only way I could hear the fan is if I pressed my ear up to the vent. All in all, noise is no big deal, but I have seen quieter systems.

Battery

15” notebooks have always had shorter battery life than their smaller counterparts (with the exception of the Macbook Pros), and as such the Sony Vaio NW does rather disappoint, although for a 15” notebook it really isn’t all that bad. I did a DVD rundown test yesterday, in the Power Save mode with wireless off, brightness and volume at maximum, and closed down all background applications that might try to access the internet. The Vaio ran for 1 hour and 52 minutes before going into hibernate. This means that lowering the brightness and volume (and using headphones would help too) would allow you to watch a DVD for longer, possibly up to 2 hours and 20-30 minutes. Although you might not get through your entire movie, you could definitely get through a good portion of it, and in light use you could get up to 3 hours. Today, I started up the Vaio with 94% battery, surfed the web for an hour or so, then sat down and typed up this review (and turned off wireless), and I got a little over 3 hours of use. Not too bad.

After using this laptop for several months, I can provide a better idea of battery life. I'm always on Power Saver mode when using battery and I've pulled down a lot of the computer's power in the options to get the most out of my battery. If you're just doing Word document editing, with WiFi on and the occasional webpage, you can get about 2-2.5 hours. Heavy web surfing will take you down to 1-1.5 hours, as will multitasking (I sometimes have OneNote, MATLAB, Firefox, and Outlook running all at once plus antivirus, Dropbox, etc). All things considered, battery life isn't great but it really isn't that bad either.

Sony does offer an extended 9-cell battery as a separate purchase, but this costs a whopping $249. Until the price drops or Sony offers a CTO option, I recommend against buying the extended battery. You’d only get another 40 minutes to an hour out of it anyways, and it adds to the heft of the notebook.

Conclusion

The Sony Vaio NW is a great notebook for those looking for a big screen, great performance, discrete graphics, and lots of other goodies at a great price. You won’t find a Blu-Ray player in any other notebook at this price, and all in all the computer impresses. Users that don’t need the Blu-Ray player or discrete graphics can get this computer at Best Buy for around $649, while online configurations start at $849 for better components. Families looking for a powerhouse multimedia notebook, look elsewhere – there are HP desktop replacement notebooks with bigger screens and better insides for less, although the tradeoff is heat and battery life. I think this is a great option for students going off to college who don’t want to sacrifice performance for portability, as 5.8lbs really isn’t that heavy at all and battery life is acceptable. This is a solid multimedia and all-purpose notebook.

Pros:
Great performance
Build quality is decent
Good port selection
Slim profile, relatively light for its size
Heat management is good
Discrete graphics
Free Windows 7 upgrade!
Instant-on OS works well and boots fast
Battery life is acceptable

Cons:
Computer can get noisy
OK speakers
Screen viewing angles are poor
Touchpad buttons are stiff
Design is love it or hate it
Construction is entirely recycled plastic (I would like to see some magnesium alloy or aluminum support)
No eSATA

If there is anything else you'd like to see, please post and let me know.

Update 11-30-09: I added some frame rates for several games and updated battery life analysis.

[itworker]

Great review. Thanks.

[Uwe Blab]

Great review...thanks.

[bounci.rabbit.123]

Thanks guys! Anything else you'd like me to include?

[zee500]

hi
can i just say great review and thanks
im a student about to start university and looking for a good laptop to use.
ive looked at both the macbook pro and vaio NW series. but what in your opinion is the right one to buy and why?
thanks

[Miyabi]

Thanks for the review

[bounci.rabbit.123]

Originally Posted by zee500

hi
can i just say great review and thanks
im a student about to start university and looking for a good laptop to use.
ive looked at both the macbook pro and vaio NW series. but what in your opinion is the right one to buy and why?
thanks

it really comes down to battery life and money. the macbook pros will give you a lot more battery life and a bit better performance, although in real life you won't notice a huge difference unless you're converting videos or something very processor intensive.

i take it that you're looking at the 15" laptops, not the 13" ones, since you're comparing MBPs with the NW series. the 15" MBPs are nearly twice as expensive as the vaios are. although you get a lot better battery life, you could also purchase an additional battery for the sony and still get about 5+ hours with both. MBP has better graphics though. then again, if you're into heavy gaming you aren't looking for either of these anyways.

another thing about this laptop is that the left side gets hot easily, but the right side stays ice cool. now, maybe i'm biased because i'm working in a hot environment. but that's one of the things about this notebook that i don't quite like. however, be prepared for high temperatures on a macbook too - the aluminum chassis is in essence a giant heatsink.

i was very close to buying a MBP, then i saw these and decided that it was a far better deal. money is tight these days. i wholeheartedly recommend the NW. you get about the same specs for half the money. and you can buy a second battery if one isn't enough for you.

[Fritteh]

Thanks for the excellent review. I'm personally a bit disappointed that it isn't built in some metal like magnesium alloy, but I've pretty much decided that this is the laptop that I want to buy for my last year at the university (will come in handy for taking my bachelors degree). However, there is one major issue that I'm hoping that someone can help me sort out. This laptop is not available here in the Nordics and I was wondering if anyone of you knows if it will be available for purchase here and, if so, when that will be. I've tried googling several times but to no success.

Importing is not an option due to the fact that I can get a very nice deal if it's available in my country.

[zee500]

hi
thanks for your reply. really helpfull.
i think i am going to purchase the NW series (still deciding to buy the blu-ray drive or not). one problem is that because im in the uk, the NW series is approx £800. but if i was to purchase from america, it would only cost £600 including shipping. not sure if it would be wise to go for the cheaper one and getit from abroad.

[nordberg]

Originally Posted by bounci.rabbit.123

Thanks guys! Anything else you'd like me to include?

Thanks for your review. There are a two things I'd like to know:

-What are the limits of running an external display via HDMI + the laptop's display? I'd like to be able to dual-screen with the laptop + my main monitor at 1900X1200

-Can you tell which firewire chipset it is running? I'm looking for a laptop running the TI chipset