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| Sony Vaio SE |
Sony really knows how to attract attention with its laptops. How: by making them look extra slick and elegant without making them less powerful in terms of performance. Because of that, experts put it in the all upscale midsize laptops category. Manufacturers thought of adding something new to their fresh from the oven Sony Vaio SE, and that was a TPM processor. People who have already bought this product consider it a very good investment. Let’s see from this review if the laptop already mentioned impressed us, too, during the tests we put it through.
Different colors available
The colors this device comes with are silver and black. We chose the latter, because we are big fans of the respective color and we think it makes Sony Vaio SE really shine when placing it next to other laptops. An alloy of aluminum and magnesium is what the body is made of; these two and the 4pounds it weighs mean that the device is light and solid. But, even though it’s among the products which are easy to carry around, it’s not a good option for those of you who commute. When we opened the lid we were greeted by the standard backlit keyboard – and one of the brightest ones so far – in the shape of an island and its well-spaced keys for a most comfortable typing. During our test we also noticed a touchpad and a number pad; the former felt very nice to the touch.
Intel Core i5 2430M processor
In terms of display, Sony Vaio SE comes built-in with a 15.5” one; we have to say that its 1920 x 1080 pixels of resolution delivered, during our tests, superb image quality with very good levels of brightness, clarity, sharpness and so on. We could watch the screen from whichever angle we wanted and everything remained as superb as in the beginning. Glare was minimal.
The team behind Sony added to their latest Sony Vaio SE the following processor: 2.4GHz Intel Core i5 2430M which was good enough for things like reading e-mails, surfing the Internet, pao/video editing and other tasks done on a daily basis. As for graphics you can either use the integrated AMD Radeon HD 6470M GPU or switch it with Intel HD 3000 graphics should you wish for battery maximization. However, this operation is somewhat difficult to perform, especially if you are a beginner.
Good battery life
Moving on to simpler things, Sony Vaio SE is equipped with 3 USB ports, VGA + HDMI, 802.11n Wi-Fi, SD card reader, memory stick reader, Bluetooth and Ethernet. We were thus able to make good use of all kinds of external devices. We were delighted to see there was also a DVD burner included.A noteworthy attraction was the Wireless Display technology; this enabled us to connect the laptop to a big-screen TV via HDMI, but it didn’t come for free.
SonyVaio SE could go for either 6 hours and a half, or 3 hours, depending on whether we used an optional slice battery or not. After switching to an option called Stamina, the laptop registered a better time; when we turned both the GPU and slice battery off, we could use the device almost all day long without needing to recharge it. There’s 1-year warranty and online and phone support.
Test and review conclusions
All in all, our conclusion is simple. The new Sony Vaio SE was one of the best laptops we reviewed so far.
Technical specifications and features
| * Operating System : Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) |
| * Graphics : AMD Radeon HD 6470M / Intel HD3000 |
| * Processor : 2.4GHz Intel Core i5 2430M |
| * Hard drive : 640GB 7,200rpm |
| * Memory : 4GB, 1,333MHz DDR3 |
| * Display : 15.5 inch |
| * Chipset : Intel HM65 |
