Review: The Sony VAIO NS10L/S
Overview
With a brand name such as Sony, you know your going to be getting a laptop from a highly established manufacturer. As well as this, Sony are also known for their lightweight and stylish laptops combined with power.
To get your hands of one of these gems of a laptop that include all these features, you would either need to sell your kids or opt for the more legal option of re-mortgaging the house!
Well those days seem to be in the past for us as Sony are bringing out a laptop within the £400 price tag. But what does this Sony laptop have to offer? Do we get the well known Sony make or a cheap alternative with a Sony logo thrown on?
Review
Style
This laptop seems to come in only one colour – white. Which while looking clean and simple means you have to keep this laptop anyway from anything that has a remote speck of dust which leaves my house out of the question then.
Apart from this the Sony laptop comes with clear, smooth rounded corners which help it look like it’s a laptop cut above the rest, plus it helps from catching your knee on the usual sharp corners you expect from some laptops, so this Sony model will be a pleasure placed on your lap (until the heat kicks in of course!).
The monitor on this laptop is as you can expect, a small 15.4″ that will be fine for Office tasks but gaming might be a rather painful affair unless you have eyes like superman.
Under the bonnet
And so we move onto the techie side of things. Firstly, I can tell you this laptop runs a rather standard but stable piece of kit.
The processor while being a Intel Pentium Dual Core is clocked at a standard 2Ghz which should be fine for the office, animation, design tasks.
The RAM consists of a strange 3GB combination that many manufacturers seem to be adopting these days and the explanation I can think of is that they wanted it to be a 2GB laptop but with Vista using a whole 1GB out of the box they decided to install 3GB to compensate for this.
So as I have said this laptop states it comes with 3GB of RAM you will only actually be getting 2GB from this machine for your own private use, which is not Sony’s fault but at least give them credit for balancing the laptop out by adding an extra GB of RAM rather than letting Vista allowing you access to only a GB instead.
A nice addition to this laptop is that it supports the latest generation of wireless connections, the draft n. So when using this laptop with a compatible router (the latest ones) you can expect faster wireless speeds than you are use to as well as a wider range away from the router.
This Sony machine also gives you 250GB of Hard Drive space, so saving all your work documents as well as a few hundred MP3 files and be done without bogging the machine down.
Now onto my favourite spec, the video card. This machine comes with an Intel GMA 4500MHD…woooo…I hear you say, if you have read my other reviews then you know what I’m going to say next. That being that this laptop will not be able to handle anything remotely 2008+ gaming wise (well except WoW) so be prepared to fall in love with the Sims if you want anything near game wise on this machine.
Other than that you can except to find the usual laptop items, DVD Writer drive, a 1.3M laptop webcam as well as a card reader.
The Gaj-It Verdict
Design 10/10
Usability: 10/10
Features: 8/10
Value: 8/10
We Say
A nice student/office laptop that will handle anything you thrown at it, just not anything gaming wise.
Technical Specs
- Processor – Intel Pentium Dual Core T3200 / 2 GHz ( Dual-Core )
- 3 GB (installed) – DDR2 SDRAM – 667 MHz
- 250 GB – Serial ATA-150 – 5400 rpm
- Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
- 15.4′ TFT 1280 x 800 ( WXGA ) – X-black
- DVD±RW (±R DL) / DVD
- Intel GMA 4500MHD
- Bluetooth – No
- Notebook Camera – Integrated – 1.3 Megapixel
Shop For It
Related posts:
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- Review: The Acer AS5535 – A Powerhouse Office Laptop
- CES: Sony Vaio P Series Lifestyle “The World’s Lightest Notebook”
- Review: Toshiba U400-145 – The Perfect Office Laptop
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Comments
mine is coming this week, and i can assure you it will run cod cod2 and possibly cod3, but not sure about any of the others, im just getting it for web design so not so much for gaming, but i have the games and will try them out for you when it comes.
That would be great Dan, I would of thought the FPS on COD 3 would be dreadful tho so prove me wrong hehe
Should be a good little laptop for web design
Have heard this laptop has some problems with wireless use- something about when it is turned off for a couple of hours, it refuses to see the wireless hub upon restarting. Did you see anything like this?
Cheers
hhhmmm no I have not heard anything about this, might b a simple driver malfunction so see if you can update the drivers.
I’ll look into it in the meantime
Just looked at the Laptop Direct website and they have some in stock
http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Sony_VAIO_NS10L-S_VGNNS10L-S.CEK/version.asp?PID=
I have this notebook for some time now and must say i’m really pleased with it all, it never failed so far and if you activate both of the cores than it goes pretty quik, the only downside is the battery life, u can get maybe 2 full hours on Vaio optimized, but for the pricetag u cant complain at all.
I have this laptop, if it helps someone with decision:
1. great performance for typical tasks
2. very reliable and versatile
3. forgot about newer games, plays smoth those from around 2000 year, no chance with newer NFS or GTA4
I really can’t wait to see some cheap laptops, and i’m glad, sony are lowering the price a lot too!