Sony VAIO L Series VPC-L11S1E/S

There’s one thing Sony do exceptionally well, and that’s make ‘mediacentric’ ‘all-in one’ PCs, this is absolutely no exception.

For the best part of twenty years you had two choices in PC design; a laptop, or a desktop unit. That was pretty much it. Both were designed primarily around the business market, and neither looked especially suited to the ‘home’ environment.

Apple went some way to smashing the mould with the highly influential ‘iMac’ design in the late 1990s – but they concentrated on internet connectivity, and multimedia was almost seen as an afterthought – they also used the highly individual MacOS.

Around five or six years ago, with the advent of flatscreen technology, a number of ‘mainstream’ manufacturers started to offer the ‘all in one’ formatwith a distinctly ‘wintel’ flavour – Sony being one of the most notable.

It’s understandable – given their immense business interests in media, why Sony would be involved in this – I was an early adopter of this sort of system, having purchased a VPC-V2S model in 2006.

The one drawback in owning this sort of system (and in common with notebooks) is that if anything breaks, you’re pretty much scuppered in terms f being able to repair them; typically they use a lot of custom designed components which are far harder to source that bog-standard desktop desktop kit.

It was with a degree of frustration then, at the realisation that the video components had given uo the ghost, that I was forced to consider replacing my trusty VPC with a new model.

As the upgrade paths are limited (you can usually only replace the commodity components such as hard disk drives and memory) my advice in buying any system of his ilk is to get as high specification as you can possibly afford.

The VPC-L11S1E/S is a perfect example.

The computer comprises of four main components; wireless keyboard and mouse, infrared remote control, and a hugely impressive 23” screen, with motherboard, power supply, Blu-Ray DVD drive, wireless, webcam, Bluetooth, speakers, card readers and more interfaces than you could shake a stick at.

The whole thing comes with a 500Gb internal hard drive built in.
Provided with Windows/7, and a stack of bundled software, it provides ‘right out the box’ functionality which is aimed at personal multimedia applications, as well as having the capability to manage, edit and display multimedia content including audio, pictures and video.

A built in ‘freeview’ tuner even allows you to use this as a TV and Personal Video Recorder.

Sporting support for both HD-SD and ‘Memory stick’ cards, it’s immediately compatible with the majority of digital cameras (almost the only current ones it misses out on are ‘Compact flash’ and ‘XD’ format)

At a typical price of around £1400 – it isn’t cheap by any standards, but you do get a huge amount of kit, and bundled software for your money.

The price should be looked at in context though; instead of looking upon this as a ‘simple’ C it also functions as a TV, DVD/Blu-Ray player, photo management system and HD monitor (It has an HDMI Input socket, as well as TOSlink optical audio out.

If you were to buy all these components separately, you’d easily pay more, and it wouldn’t be contained in one very neat pckage, and you’d still have the problem of getting it all to integrate properly.

The Intel Core2 Duo processor allows a 64 bit version of Windows/7 to run flawlessly, and 4Gb of memory is (for the moment at least) more than enough for most domestic requirements.

The bundled software includes Windows Woks (never liked that myself!) a 60 day trial of Office/2007 (I already have a full licence for this, so I also removed this) a 12 month subscription to one of the antivirus utilities (which I replaced with AVG Free edition) and notably Adobe Photoshop Elements 7, and Premier Elements 7, to do your picture and video editing.

Roxio Easy Media Creator is supplied to do your ‘burning’ and there’s a host of Sony apps for multimedia work, as well as a higly functional implementation of MediaCentre which can be managed by the remote control to view TV and listen to radio broadcasts on Freeview.

Something I had very mixed feelings about was the ‘touch sensitive screen’ – personally I hate fingermarks on my monitor, so I disabled this almost immediately! (perhaps I should get a pair of cotton gloves to avoid fingermarks!)

The base unit stands upright when you open out a ‘trestle’ support on the back of the machine – I would also hae welcomed ISO flatscreen mounting points so it could have been stuck on a wall, but I suppose I’m just being picky.

In spite of the hefty price tag, you’re still expected to make your own set of recovery disks – that would have added no more than a couple of quid to the asking price. In their defence, Sony suggest that a complete hard disk failure is relatively uncommon these days, and a full ‘recovery’ partition is pre-instaed.

The system is an absolute joy to sue though.
It’s sufficiently high-specification to be able to run all the software with no performance issues at all –I fully expect this to meet my needs for at least the next five years or so.

If you want a complete ‘out the box’ uncomplicated system which simply does the work without fuss , then you could do an awful lot worse than considering this system.

It ‘aint cheap, but that’s for a reason!

Other manufacturers make broadly similar systems at slightly lower cost, but where
this system wins is in the integration stakes, and the fact that it looks absolutely drop-dead gorgeous.

Almost any other system of this type makes deliberate compromises in order to keep the price lower, Sony, on the other hand, have thrown the virtual ‘kitchen sink’ at this particular model.

With the possible exception of not supporting Terrestrial HDTV, and lacking a satellite tuner, I can’t recall a single PC which offered such a range of functionality without making any compromises.

Almost the only serious defect in its design is in having ‘just’ 500Gb of storage – although to be fair, if that isn’t enough, you’d probably want to invest in an external disk drive or NAS storage system.

In nearly 20 years of owning personal computers, I can’t recall any system which HADN’T left me thinking ‘if only it ...’ except this one.

In my opinion, it’s worth every penny.