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Sony Vaio VPC-EE2S1E/B review

Sony Vaio VPC-EE2S1E/B
Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £653
inc VAT

Sony's latest Vaio looks sleek, but it's not fast enough in everyday applications compared to other laptop, and it has unusually short battery life.

Specifications

15.6 in 1,366×768 display, 2.6kg, 1.8GHz AMD Phenom II X3 P820, 4.00GB RAM, 320GB disk, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

http://www.sony.co.uk

Sony has equipped its latest Vaio laptop with one of AMD’s latest processors, the triple-core Phenom II X3 P820. Even though it’s paired with 4GB of RAM, its performance in our benchmarks was so slow we reran the tests just to be sure. It came at the bottom of the charts in all our application tests and couldn’t keep up with laptops equipped with Intel dual-core processors.

The Vaio isn’t well-suited to working away from a power socket, either. It lasted just two hours and 24 minutes in our tests – one of the shortest times we’ve seen recently. Surprisingly, its Mobility Radeon HD 5145 graphics chip did quite well in our demanding 3D graphics test, running Call of Duty 4 at 20fps. With some tweaking, it can play most of the latest titles smoothly.

Most 15in laptops can’t accommodate a keyboard and a numeric keypad without making some sacrifices and the EE2S1E is no exception. Although Sony has managed to squeeze one in without any odd key layouts, the keys are a little small. This simply meant that it took longer than usual to get used to their size. The touchpad is large and accurate with buttons that give just the right amount of feedback when pressed. You’ll either love or hate the pad’s textured, grainy feel, though.

Sony Vaio VPC-EE2S1E/B

We were impressed by the bright, vivid and accurate colours of the 15.6in glossy widescreen display. It’s not perfect though – whites have a slight blueish tint while the tight viewing angles means that colours can change when you adjust your sitting position.

The screen doesn’t tilt back very far, so we couldn’t always adjust the screen to the best viewing angle when using it on our lap. The sleek, understand black design is classy, though, and it feels sturdy, too. The integrated stereo speakers are reasonably loud, but this is offset by their muffled sound and harsh treble. The 320GB internal hard disk is a little bit stingy – we’d expect 500GB at this price.

Sony has bundled a selection of its own-brand software with the Vaio. The PMB program allows you to import, organise and browse your collection of photos and home videos. Meanwhile, Vaio Media plus allows you to view media stored on UPnP media servers, such as other computers and network storage devices. You can also configure the EE2S1E to act as a UPnP server. An unusual addition is a utility which allows you to use the keyboard and touchpad to control a Playstation 3 games console on the same network.

We wanted to like the EE2S1E. It looks classy and comes with a useful software bundle, but its short battery life and below-par Windows performance means we can’t recommend it. Even if you’re tempted by the Vaio’s 3D performance, there are better alternatives here.

Basic Specifications

Rating ***
Processor AMD Phenom II X3 P820
Processor clock speed 1.8GHz
Memory 4.00GB
Memory slots 2
Memory slots free 0
Maximum memory 8GB
Size 32x370x249mm
Weight 2.6kg
Sound Realtek HD Audio
Pointing device touchpad

Display

Viewable size 15.6 in
Native resolution 1,366×768
Graphics Processor ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5145
Graphics/video ports HDMI, VGA
Graphics Memory 512MB

Storage

Total storage capacity 320GB
Optical drive model TSST TS-L633C
Optical drive type DVD+/-RW +/-DL

Ports and Expansion

USB ports 4
Bluetooth yes
Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Wireless networking support 802.11b/g/n
PC Card slots none
Modem No
Supported memory cards SDHC, MMC, Memory Stick Pro/Duo
Other ports none

Miscellaneous

Carrying case No
Operating system Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Operating system restore option restore partition
Software included Sony PMB Vaio Edition, Sony Vaio Media plus, Sony Remote Keyboard and Play with PlayStation 3, Roxio Easy Media Creator 10 LJ
Optional extras none

Buying Information

Warranty one year collect and return
Price £653
Details www.sony.co.uk
Supplier http://www.sony.co.uk

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