Sony Vaio VGN-AR51M

...business and home use. My Sony Vaio has not let me down with either of these.

Design
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In general the design of the laptop, (although much the same as any other) is very good. The extra ports are well laid out and easy to access. The laptop is not as lightweight as others on the market, but is still light enough to be carried around with comfort.
The keyboard is well designed and easy to use likewise is ...
...with the amazingly clear screen. Sony have for some time been a brand leader with their range of black screens. The 17" TFT fitted to this laptop is no exception. The image quality and clarity is nothing less than superb. Before buying the laptop, I was a bit sceptical with regards to the "High-Res'" claims made by Sony. Having now had what can only be described as "The Pleasure" of owning it, I can confirm that "High ... more

I purchased this Laptop from Ebay just before Xmas for slightly over £870, which was significantly cheaper than both the high street and all other internet sites.
I have so far been more than impressed and would like to convey my personal observations on what I can only describe as a fantastic buy.

Choice of purchase
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This was a replacement for an older IBM think-pad that had become somewhat dated. I decided to plumb for a mid-range laptop that I could use for both business and home use. My Sony Vaio has not let me down with either of these.

Design
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In general the design of the laptop, (although much the same as any other) is very good. The extra ports are well laid out and easy to access. The laptop is not as lightweight as others on the market, but is still light enough to be carried around with comfort.
The keyboard is well designed and easy to use likewise is the touch-pad.
In terms of build quality,the laptop gives the appearance and feel of being solidly made and robust enough to stand the test of time. My only slight criticism here is that the lid protecting the screen I believe could be a little bit stronger to offer more protection, especially as these TFT panels cost an arm and a leg to replace.

Features
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Quite simply there are lots of them.
To start with the amazingly clear screen. Sony have for some time been a brand leader with their range of black screens. The 17" TFT fitted to this laptop is no exception. The image quality and clarity is nothing less than superb. Before buying the laptop, I was a bit sceptical with regards to the "High-Res'" claims made by Sony. Having now had what can only be described as "The Pleasure" of owning it, I can confirm that "High Resolution" is exactly what you get.

To work horse behind the display is the on-board Nvidia Ge force graphics card. Again as a comparison to my old Think-pad, this used to have Mb of shared memory. In contrast the Sony has a dedicated 256Mb memory as standard. The benefit of this is that the graphics card is more than capable of running the vast majority of programmes, including the highly demanding Vista without tapping into the main RAM. In addition to this there is an option of using shared memory to boost the graphics memory up to 1Ghz. Again this makes the laptop truly versatile as it caters for even the demands of gamers.

Sound on the laptop is provided by an on-board sound card. Surprisingly compared to the rest of the spec., this is nothing out of the ordinary but does provide a 3D sound effect. Having said that, at the end of the day, it is a laptop designed for portability, consequently the notion of 5.1 surround doesn't really make any sense. The sound quality is however more than acceptable and compared to my old IBM, a lot richer sound.

The big selling point from Sony with this and others in the range is their blu-ray system. This is basically Sony's unique version of HD DVD (a bit like the old VHS vs Betamax syndrome). I did buy a blu -ray film just to see what all the fuss is about. The picture quality and sharpness of image is very very impressive! However in practical terms for PC use the disks for blu-ray are still way over-priced to be of any use to the average user. Fortunately the far more cost effective DVD is still available on the laptop.
What is a little disappointing, is the write speeds for DVD. For standard DVD +/-r the write speed is 8x reducing to a mere 2.4x for Dual Layer DVD. Whilst 8 speed is not slow by any means, I would have expected it to be at least 16x as this seems to have been the norm for some time now. I can only assume that this is some kind of sacrifice made for having blu-ray in the same drive.

I guess the thing we all tend to judge a PC or laptop by, is the speed in which it performs the tasks given to it. The laptop is fitted with the Intel T7250 processor with 2Ghz of DDR2 ram (the memory can be upgraded to 4Ghz if required as an upgrade). The processor is the newer core 2 duo running at 2 Ghz. Operational speeds of the laptop are superb. From gaming to Office applications the laptop operates with a very impressive performance rate.
Where I have noticed the superior processing speed is whilst running downloads. I occasionally download large files from the net whilst using video editing suites at the same time. If I do this on my desktop, I get a serious lag in operating performance. My laptop on the other hand runs both at speed with no problems what so ever.

Communication is offered on a number of different platforms including bluetooth, wifi, LAN and 56k modem. The laptop does have a PCMCIA slot available for additional expansion slots, however with every kind of device fitted as standard, I have yet to find the need to use this.
Wifi reception of the built on antenna is exceptional. During the course of my work, I do use Wifi hot-spots on a regular basis. As a direct comparison to my old laptop, the signal strength obtained at transfer speeds are much better with my Sony.

Another handy little feature is the integration of a web-cam. I must admit that whilst the picture is good, it is not quite what I expected from Sony. I think my expectations of this feature were based upon Sony's reputation for their camera's and camcorders. In reality the image does seem to lack the sharpness I was expecting.

On-board storage is provided with a massive 320Gb hard drive. Even with storing a large amount of graphic files, the amount of storage available is more than you should need. To compliment the processing speed and memory, the hard drive uses S-ATA. The advantage of this being that data transfer during both reading and writing is carried out a lot faster than the older IDE system. As I said earlier I do work with a lot of graphics, the speed of which I can search for, open and save files compared to my old laptop is like chalk and cheese!

The operating system is unfortunately (in my opinion) the new offering from Microsoft...Vista. I must admit to not being a very big fan of the system. Yes it looks impressive with its fancy graphics, and some of the layout changes are quite good for navigating your way around Windows. However the first big problem you will encounter is that it totally incompatible with 90% off existing hardware. As an example, the first thing I had to go out and buy was a new printer, despite the fact that my existing one was less than two years old. Unless your hardware was purchased within the last 12 months, there is every possibility it will not work with Vista as drivers are virtually non existent. Microsoft appear to have done their usual "Get it on the shelves and sort the problems out later". I fail to see why Microsoft couldn't have written into Vista a compatibility programme to migrate XP drivers.

Let-downs
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There are just 3 let down for me that I have found which are as follows
1) The lid could be a little stronger
2) The write speed of the DVD is acceptable, but could do better
3) The battery life leaves a lot to be desired.
With regards to the latter, I was lead to believe that dual core processors had gone a long way to increase battery life. In reality with average use, I struggle to get more than 70 - 80 minutes on one charge. If you intent to use this as a portable unit, a spare battery would need to be at the top of your "Must have accessory list". A word of advise here though, don't order one from either Sony or high street unless you have more money than sense. I managed to obtain a replacement that works better than the original for over a third less from Ebay.

Summary
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To summarise, this is by no means a budget price laptop, neither is it a top end one. However for a Sony product made with all the quality you would expect, it is an exceptionally good buy giving you plenty for your money. Before buying this model, I would have expected to pay at least £200 - £300 for the same spec. To me Sony have gone a long way with this model to disprove the "Good but overpriced" reputation long associated with the brand. I would definitely recommend this laptop as a great all rounder. 

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