This weekend I purchased a replacement laptop for my Gateway Tablet PC. I reviewed a lot of different options but focused mostly on HP, Dell, Gateway, Sony, Samsung and even Apple. First lets start with each of the lines of laptop I didn’t choose and why.
HP scored well on CNET reviews with the Pavilion dv3510nr, so I took a trip to Best Buy to check it out. I wasn’t really impressed. It was just another laptop.
Dell as always seems to have a build your own laptop for everyone. The cost of adding a Blu-ray drive and the limited number of models that ship with them drove me away.
Gateway’s new MD series is nice but this is a dying brand. I’m not sure they will still be here in a year.
Samsung’s new X360-34G is very nice, but the price is too high.
Apple’s designs are awesome but I’m not sure I will ever get use to the lack of the right click button. I almost went with a MacBook Pro to give me the option of running OSX, but I properly would have stopped using it after a month. Price was also too high.
The Sony Vaio line is my favorite PC laptop line as far as style goes. But to be fair, they seem like MacBook clones. The FW series was the closest to the specs I wanted. This review is based specifically on the VGN-FW35iJ.
Sony Vaio VGN-FW351J
The Good
The Sony Vaio VGN-FW351IJ feels like a MacBook Pro clone. It’s got good specs for the money. $899 will get you 4GB of RAM, a Core 2 Duo processor, Blu-ray drive, a 16.4” widescreen and a 320GB hard drive. It’s very light and portable for it’s size and well balanced. Heat doesn’t dissipate into your legs when using it on your lap. The HDMI output port makes this laptop a nice portable Blu-ray player. Blu-Ray playback was smooth, the drive wasn’t noisy and the system didn’t spike with heat. All bonuses when trying to watch a movie in bed.
The Bad
The area to the right of the touchpad warms up to a very noticeable level. The VGA port is on the left, most people will not consider this a drawback, but I have gotten use to having my monitor on the right so I have more cables crossing my desk than before.
The Ugly
The USB ports are all on the right. This makes it hard to use an external mouse for a right handed person while external components are attached. The OS is also loaded with a lot of crapware like Microsoft Works, Quicken and a whole bunch of Vaio utilities that badly need reducing and combining.
Recommendation
Well, I’ve only been using it for a few days, but I’m happy with the purchase. I would buy it again. It’s a great laptop for the price. I think I would need to purchase a MacBook Pro at 3 times the cost to get a better 17” laptop.