Sony VGN-FE11S review

If you want a laptop that looks good and performs better than many desktop PCs out there, then you've probably had more than one person tempt your wallet with an Apple PowerBook.

Sure it might be tempting to reel out the old adage that beauty is only skin deep and its what is underneath that really matters, but there's no reason why brutish power and lithe delicate beauty can't go hand-in-hand.

Sony's VGN-FE11S employs one of Intel's revolutionary new dual-core processors for performance that will shame your old laptop, desktop PC - and all those devilishly handsome Apple Macs too.

WELL HELLO THERE

The Sony may come at a fairly hefty price, but the moment you slip it from its packaging, it's immediately clear why. The silvery white matte finish looks and feels lovely, and the case feels strong enough to withstand a few knocks and scrapes. The lid is particularly rigid and showed hardly any flex at all. If only more laptops felt so sturdy and looked as attractive.

For such a stylish laptop, the Sony has a heart of gold. Intel's Core Duo T2400 processor has two processor cores, each running at 1.83GHz and ably abetted by a generous 1GB of RAM, they helped propel the VGN-FE11S to a hugely impressive score of 141.47 in our benchmarks. This is the kind of performance that will keep everything running smoothly, even with several demanding applications running at once. Better still, all this power doesn't compromise the Sony's battery life, which lasted an impressive 2 hours and 41 minutes.

It might seem curious that Sony has chosen to use Windows XP Media Center edition when the VGN-FE11S doesn't even have a TV tuner installed, but this actually makes a lot of sense. Windows XP Media Center gives you everything that you'd find in a standard version of Windows XP, but install a USB or PCMCIA TV tuner card later and you can take advantage of the slick Media Center functions for watching and recording TV.

Even without a TV tuner installed, Media Center is still handy for watching DVDs and browsing MP3s, photos and video files. Should you find yourself amassing a huge selection of MP3s and video files, then the Sony's gigantic 160GB hard disk provides ample storage.

FEAST YOUR EYES

The Sony wouldn't be much cop for Media Center if its screen wasn't up to par and in this regard the VGN-FE11S doesn't disappoint. Its demure frame houses a generous 15.4in widescreen display with a native resolution of 1280x800. We've seen laptops with higher resolution displays but what the Sony loses in pixels, it more than makes up for with quality.

Whether it was photos, movies or just the Windows desktop, the image presented was bright and showed great contrast. The screen is covered in a glossy finish, so does suffer from a little glare when under really bright fluorescent lights, but in most home situations this shouldn't be an issue. The benefits of the Sony's glossy screen are that movies and images look far more vibrant than when viewed on a traditional matte display. Really fast-moving games and hectic action sequences in films did show up some subtle, but noticeable, ghosting though.

FAIR GAME

If your favoured brand of entertainment is indulging in a dash of gaming then the Sony's brand new nVidia GeForce Go 7400 graphics chips should appeal. While this sounds fancy, its performance was none too spectacular and limped home in our Doom 3 benchmark with a score of 11.6 frames per second (fps). Turning off anti-aliasing did, however, produce a much more acceptable score of 29fps. As long as you aren't expecting to go too crazy with ultra-high detail settings then the Sony has enough poke to do justice to even demanding 3D games.