Got my Sony Vaio S series a couple of months back and it’s such a lovely laptop with very few complaints. The specs of the laptop are as follows:
CPU: core i7-2640M(it’s the highest clocked dual core cpu from intel)
HDD: 750GB @ 5400rpm(shame but makes sense though)
RAM: 6 GB DDR3
Graphics: Radeon HD6630M+ intel HD3000
Screen: 13 inch matte Finish938844 at 1600x900
Weight: 1.65 kg
Price: INR 78, 000(approx. as of 3rd June.) got it for MYR 4, 500.
As the specs point out this laptop is no sissy 13 inch laptoy. It has more raw power than a lot of mainstream laptops in the market and equally more expensive but still below the Macbooks.
Design: The first thing I noticed about this laptop is it’s simplistic angular design. I personally have preference for angular hellokids over rounded corners so this design was perfect for me. It rather looks very professional which is exactly what I wanted. It is built in a sturdy metallic case. Probably a magnesium alloy and painted black which also makes it a finger print magnet. That’s just a minor issue. The keyboard is responsive and Chiclet styled just like a macbook. A rather annoying design feature is the touchpad placement. It’s placed at the very edge and it’s easy to accidentally push the touchpad buttons when working. It might need some time to get used to. The fingerprint reader is right there between the touchpad buttons. Personally I am no fan of those things. It’s cumbersome to setup and use. By the time the software accepts my fingerprint, I would’ve easily typed in my password and very well on my way to being productive. This laptop comes with a nice switch to choose between stamina or speed mode. Everybody knows NVIDIA does this on the software side, but since AMD is not good with software switching Sony decided to chuck in a hardware MUX switch to choose between the dedicated Radeon card and the intel HD3000. It works as it should and love it.
Performance: Raw benchmark performance should be the same as any other review websITES_Company I suppose. A little disappointment is that this laptop won’t be as fast as your expectations might be even with one powerful processor and 6 GB of RAM. The bottleneck I found was with the hard disk and the unnecessary software preloaded by Sony. We love you Sony, but that doesn’t mean we love your buggy software. Once the software is removed(specifchandru021y the media gallery) boot times and speed seems to be very good. Since the HDD is one of the slower kind, file transfers and the likes should be as fast as laptops that came out a few years ago. The reason for the slower hard disk is to extend battery life. A 7200 RPM hard disk would suck twice as much power. If you can afford it, this laptop comes with 256GB solid state drive which can make it very very fast. Graphics performance is pretty decent with the Radeon card. I can play need for speed at all high settings when on speed mode.
Screen: I have to talk about the wonderful screen! If you are used to the unusual 1366x768 this screen is a delight to work on. Even though it’s a 13 inch screen the resolution compensates for that and actually feels much better than a 15 inch or a 14incher. Since it’s a matte Finish938844, absolutely no glares under the sun or any other light. The brightness is very high and I hardly need to increase it one or two notches from the minimum.
Battery and Heat: Battery life is excellent even with a few powerful components under the hood(or should I say under the keyboard). It lasts an average 4 to 5 hours on stamina mode at 80% battery when connected to wireless with browsing and occasional movie. When put on speed mode the battery lasts for 2 to 3 hours on the same light usage. Which is not at all bad! Sony does provide a sheet battery that goes under the laptop which is advertised to double the battery time.
As for the heat, there is a major design flaw on the laptop. The fan vent is placed directly under the center screen hinge and when you open the laptop, the hinge covers half of the vent. When gaming or doing anything gpu or cpu intensive you can feel the hinge coming to a boil and the laptop can’t be place on your lap comfortable without feeling the intense heat. Till now the heat hasn’t bothered me and hasn’t affected the performance of the laptop. The cpu is designed to idle at 50C temperature and you would easily see it jump to 90C or 95C when gaming or doing something that pushes the cpu or gpu.
Overall it’s a wonderful laptop for anybody who wants a portable powerful laptop but comes at a little steep price. The heat wouldn’t be a problem because the CPU and GPU are made to throttle down when temperatures get pretty high and there won’t be any damage to the internals. Would definitely recommend anybody who like angular hellokids, a good resolution screen and powerful components at one and a half kilograms.
Update: I had a realization a couple of days back. The charger is very much "underpowered". If you are gaming or doing something cpu & gpu intensive with the charger plugged in, the odds of the battery not charging is pretty high. This is because on full load this laptop needs well over 45W of power and the charger is not designed for full load power consumption as well as charging the battery. So in the end, when doing some demanding stuff on this laptop, connect the charger to just maintain the battery percentage.
Update: This laptop’s graphics card can cause minor issues to kernel dumps on any other operating system other than windows. I have a triple boot system with freeBSD and Debian which I use for some undisclosed purposes(I can tell you, but I have to kill after that;-)). The problem comes with the lack of driver support from AMD for these platforms. So I had to choose between either the HD3000 or the AMD Radeon. On freeBSD I am sticking it out with the HD3000 which is more than enough for me. On Debian I am sticking with the AMD Radeon since I need that driver for my hobby of doing stuff on the GPU. One more thing is that I can’t install a original driver downloaded from AMD’s website. The reason is AMD thought of dropping support for the hardware MUX switch like what Sony has. So it’s better to stick with Sony’s driver updates.