This is my review of the Sony Vaio S Series laptop. The exact model # is VPCSC1AFM. Please google for specs. First let me tell you I'm not a Sony fan, or a Best buy fan. This laptop is only available through best buy as a special unit that they only sell which gives the buyer a excellent value. There is a lot of truth to this statement. There is no other laptop close to this price that can compete it in the 13.3 inch catagory. Even though I don't like best buy it had to buy it from there. In addition to the laptop I got 1 year of anti-virus, and a netgear wireless video adapter which lets the laptop connect to a HDTV wireless. The value of that stuff is $169.99. It's a nice gift that goes along with the laptop. The laptop cost $979. I hope this review helps people who a looking for a ultra portable laptop, or anyone who wants a laptop and doesn't know where to look. Personally I feel a laptop should be no bigger than 14" to be truely portable. Anything larger is a desktop replacement and is in a totally different segment. Here goes the review.
This thing really looks fantastic. The entire laptop is made of brushed metals and gives it a really high end look. I love the internal, yet customer replacable battery. The build quality is good. The unit has more give to it than I'd like it to have. But I have pretty high expectations. The keyboard is amazing and better than my full size keyboard and worlds better my acer laptop which has a horrible layout. The keyboard is backlit which at first sounds like a gimmick, but it's really a nice usuable feature. The trackpad and buttons are as good as it's going to get. I perfer to use a wireless bluetooth mouse (microsoft 4000). I love the power setting switch which lets your change power settings on the without going through windows. The unit usually runs quiet, unless you do anything CPU intensive and then you really hear it... Is it bad? That's really though. I've never seen a powerful and ultra thin laptop that doesn't get loud at full load. You have limited space, with all the heat building up inside you need the fan to dissapate it. It's expected that you'll hear the fan go nuts. I ran prime 95, 4 threads and the temps hit 84C using core temp. Since prime 95 isn't a really program, you need to take it with a grain of salt. Right now it's 80F in my room and as I'm typing this core temps read at 40C. The laptop doesn't have any annoying bright lights like my acer does. The bottom of the laptop gives you access to the hard drive, battery, memory, and wifi card. That's excellent in my book, did I mention that I love the internal battery?
Lets talk hardware. This laptop is Fast. I came from using a Core 2 Quad 2.83GHz with 4GB of RAM to a Core i5 2410M CPU which runs at 2.3GHz and 2.7 when it needs to. Lets me tell you, it feels just as fast as my desktop, if not a tad bit more responsive. Very impressive. 4GB of RAM are more than enough for my everyday tasks, esspecially DDR3 running at 1333. Sandra memory scores gets me 56.2ns in latency, and over 10,000 in read, write, and copy. Impressive for a ultra slim light weight laptop. The hard drive in this thing is great too. It's the Seagate 500GB drive with 4GB of SLC SSD built into it. Yes it makes a difference. Boot up is quick and requent programs load very fast. Actually to be honest, my desktop had a Corsair P128 SSD and this hard drive feels faster when it comes to response time. The P128 got really slow after a few months of use even with TRIM. The hard drive has plenty of storage space, so you don't need to walk around with a spare drive. I wouldn't fill it past 380-400GB. Video is the Sony S is excellent. It handles HD 1080p video with ease and when I used the HDMI port to connect to my girlfriends 42" LCD TV, them video looked amazing. The Sony S have a built in blu-ray drive and it's a great feature just to have, although I won't use it all the time. I love how I can customize a profile for her TV and just make everything perfect. I also use the HDMI port to connect to my DELL 22" IPS display at home when I do serious photography work, and it works great. I use it like a desktop when I need to, I just close the lid and connect my full size mouse and keyboard and you'd never know I'm using a laptop. The display on the Sony S is average. It's very crisp and sharp, but the color quality and viewing angles are poor. I had to tweak the display settings to make it better...I personally feel Sony being into LCD TV's and monitors could have done better on the display. I don't plan on ever doing any serious work on it that requires accurate color reproduction, for that I'll use my HDMI linked to the DELL IPS screen I have. Overall I have no complaints about the screen for basic use or even movies, just crank up the brightness and decrease the gamma to 0.7 and it will look much better. The laptop has two video cards, the Intel HD3000 and the ATI radeon 6470M, that's probably why the video is ultra smoooth. I haven't played any games on it, but having a 13.3" display with a ATI 6470M with DX11 support should be decent. Most ultra slim and lightweights only have the intel HD3000 so having the second video card is a nice bonus. The Built in webcam is a bit of a letdown and really is poor. I expect 720P, and this thing looks like it was on a laptop back in 2000. USB 3.0 is really great. I got 100MB write and 120MB read on my 2TB external drive, which is almost identical to what it was when it was plugged into my internal SATA port. Basically if you are going to back-up data or store data, use USB 3.0. I like the built in SD card port, but why did they include the sony magic gate port...? I don't know anyone who uses those cards. They should have had a SD and compact flash port. Period.
Motherboard issue... kinda. So this laptop has the B2 stepping chipset. It was recalled by Intel in February. I bought this laptop the end of April. This is a HUGE negative for me. But lets thing of it realistically. The defect doesn't affect SATA 0 , 1 ports. Well the laptop only has 0, 1 ports anyway. So is it really a issue? Not really. If it has a esata port then it would be. But it has USB 3.0 instead. So, I thought about returning it, but then realized it won't affect this unit. Although I STILL think Sony should not be using these recalled chipsets.
Overall I'm happy with my purchase. I couldn't find a cheaper laptop with these specs, size, and looks. I almost bought the Lenovo X220 or the X1 which are hundreds of dollars more but are almost excellent choices if you wanna spend $1,500 and up... but the TERRIBLE lenovo customer service on the phone turned me off to the point that I will never use them again. And price wise the sony is a HUGE value.
This thing really looks fantastic. The entire laptop is made of brushed metals and gives it a really high end look. I love the internal, yet customer replacable battery. The build quality is good. The unit has more give to it than I'd like it to have. But I have pretty high expectations. The keyboard is amazing and better than my full size keyboard and worlds better my acer laptop which has a horrible layout. The keyboard is backlit which at first sounds like a gimmick, but it's really a nice usuable feature. The trackpad and buttons are as good as it's going to get. I perfer to use a wireless bluetooth mouse (microsoft 4000). I love the power setting switch which lets your change power settings on the without going through windows. The unit usually runs quiet, unless you do anything CPU intensive and then you really hear it... Is it bad? That's really though. I've never seen a powerful and ultra thin laptop that doesn't get loud at full load. You have limited space, with all the heat building up inside you need the fan to dissapate it. It's expected that you'll hear the fan go nuts. I ran prime 95, 4 threads and the temps hit 84C using core temp. Since prime 95 isn't a really program, you need to take it with a grain of salt. Right now it's 80F in my room and as I'm typing this core temps read at 40C. The laptop doesn't have any annoying bright lights like my acer does. The bottom of the laptop gives you access to the hard drive, battery, memory, and wifi card. That's excellent in my book, did I mention that I love the internal battery?
Lets talk hardware. This laptop is Fast. I came from using a Core 2 Quad 2.83GHz with 4GB of RAM to a Core i5 2410M CPU which runs at 2.3GHz and 2.7 when it needs to. Lets me tell you, it feels just as fast as my desktop, if not a tad bit more responsive. Very impressive. 4GB of RAM are more than enough for my everyday tasks, esspecially DDR3 running at 1333. Sandra memory scores gets me 56.2ns in latency, and over 10,000 in read, write, and copy. Impressive for a ultra slim light weight laptop. The hard drive in this thing is great too. It's the Seagate 500GB drive with 4GB of SLC SSD built into it. Yes it makes a difference. Boot up is quick and requent programs load very fast. Actually to be honest, my desktop had a Corsair P128 SSD and this hard drive feels faster when it comes to response time. The P128 got really slow after a few months of use even with TRIM. The hard drive has plenty of storage space, so you don't need to walk around with a spare drive. I wouldn't fill it past 380-400GB. Video is the Sony S is excellent. It handles HD 1080p video with ease and when I used the HDMI port to connect to my girlfriends 42" LCD TV, them video looked amazing. The Sony S have a built in blu-ray drive and it's a great feature just to have, although I won't use it all the time. I love how I can customize a profile for her TV and just make everything perfect. I also use the HDMI port to connect to my DELL 22" IPS display at home when I do serious photography work, and it works great. I use it like a desktop when I need to, I just close the lid and connect my full size mouse and keyboard and you'd never know I'm using a laptop. The display on the Sony S is average. It's very crisp and sharp, but the color quality and viewing angles are poor. I had to tweak the display settings to make it better...I personally feel Sony being into LCD TV's and monitors could have done better on the display. I don't plan on ever doing any serious work on it that requires accurate color reproduction, for that I'll use my HDMI linked to the DELL IPS screen I have. Overall I have no complaints about the screen for basic use or even movies, just crank up the brightness and decrease the gamma to 0.7 and it will look much better. The laptop has two video cards, the Intel HD3000 and the ATI radeon 6470M, that's probably why the video is ultra smoooth. I haven't played any games on it, but having a 13.3" display with a ATI 6470M with DX11 support should be decent. Most ultra slim and lightweights only have the intel HD3000 so having the second video card is a nice bonus. The Built in webcam is a bit of a letdown and really is poor. I expect 720P, and this thing looks like it was on a laptop back in 2000. USB 3.0 is really great. I got 100MB write and 120MB read on my 2TB external drive, which is almost identical to what it was when it was plugged into my internal SATA port. Basically if you are going to back-up data or store data, use USB 3.0. I like the built in SD card port, but why did they include the sony magic gate port...? I don't know anyone who uses those cards. They should have had a SD and compact flash port. Period.
Motherboard issue... kinda. So this laptop has the B2 stepping chipset. It was recalled by Intel in February. I bought this laptop the end of April. This is a HUGE negative for me. But lets thing of it realistically. The defect doesn't affect SATA 0 , 1 ports. Well the laptop only has 0, 1 ports anyway. So is it really a issue? Not really. If it has a esata port then it would be. But it has USB 3.0 instead. So, I thought about returning it, but then realized it won't affect this unit. Although I STILL think Sony should not be using these recalled chipsets.
Overall I'm happy with my purchase. I couldn't find a cheaper laptop with these specs, size, and looks. I almost bought the Lenovo X220 or the X1 which are hundreds of dollars more but are almost excellent choices if you wanna spend $1,500 and up... but the TERRIBLE lenovo customer service on the phone turned me off to the point that I will never use them again. And price wise the sony is a HUGE value.
