Sony SZ281P laptop reviewed
It's only been a year since I got my Sony T370, but I decided to update for two reasons. One (more minor): I was tired of traveling with my giant Dell XPS laptop and my T370 every time I wanted to play Rise of Legends or Age of Empires III with one of my friends and secondly and more importantly, I figured after over two years of using my own laptop for business, I should have a laptop that was actually a company laptop, not my personal one (a giant ding in my T370 after a business trip is what pushed me over the edge).
Back in January at CES, Sony announced their VAIO SZ Premium. It was supposed to ship in March, but like all new cutting edge things, was a little late. I decided to go with the Sony VAIO SZ281P because it was still light (3.7 pounds with the standard battery), fast (2ghz Intel Core Duo), had lots of RAM (2gb), a huge hard drive (120gb), a bigger display for my aging eyes (13.3" @ 1280x800) and could play games pretty decently thanks to the NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 chipset. I've had it for a month now, and I have to say I am delighted, although there were a couple of gotchas.
First gotcha (minor) - at the time, I couldn't order the 2.16ghz Intel Core Duo. Had to "settle" for 2.0 ghz. Like I said, a minor gotcha. Bigger gotcha - the alleged 7 hours of battery life on the standard battery was a drug-induced hallucination some marketing person had. Standard battery is 3 hours at best of real usage. The good news is that by switching to the extended battery and pushing the weight of the laptop up to 4.1 pounds (still acceptable, although a full pound heavier than my T370), I could get the same performance as my T370 - 5+ hours of DVD playback, 7+ hours of office work.
My favorite thing about the Sony SZ is the dual video chipset, which I didn't even notice when I first blogged about the SZ series. You can switch between a decently fast (and power hungry) NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400 with 128MB TurboCache and a putt-putt slow but power sipping Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950 with 128MB of shared memory. I switch it to the power saving Intel chipset whenever I am on a plane, and it adds an hour or so to my usage (thus the 5ish hours of DVD playback instead of 4ish which having the NVIDIA chipset enabled gives). And the NVIDIA chipset and the 2ghz Core Duo combine to give awesome performance (at 1280x800, the native resolution of the laptop) for my two games of choice.
Finally, the docking station: I'm glad I have it, because now I don't have separate desktop and laptop, which was a huge pain in the rear. The docking station is pretty standard, with an upside of supporting DVI and 1920x1200 displays (although you have to turn on the NVIDIA card to use it). The only weird thing about the docking station is that you can't plug in any speakers. Weird, weird, weird. Luckily, I found some pretty decent USB speakers from Altec Lansing (XT1) - they are designed as portable, but they sound great and are plenty loud if you plug in the power supply (not required, but the volume is limited on USB only power).
Bottom line - this laptop makes a great business, gaming, and day to day use laptop. I love it!
Comments