Review of the Sony VAIO AW11XU/Q
Life on the road can be tough. The contents of a suitcase are certainly no match for the comforts of home, but if you pick and choose your gear with a little care it doesn’t have to be all bad. We all need cutting-edge technology for the work that we do, but when you’re living in a generic hotel outside the M6 for 8 weeks, you know you need to make that technology work for your down-time too. Starting from now, my mission is simple: to select and review the kind of technology that we, as freelancers, require to bring some much-needed joy to the world of hotel-dwelling. Bearing in mind the impracticalities of hauling computers, sound systems and so on around the world, this equipment must be selected with care. When your carrying capacity is one briefcaseand a hold-all, the equipment you choose to take must be both compact and powerful. With that in mind, let’s start by taking a look at the unstoppable powerhouse of technology that is the Sony VAIO AW11XU/Q.
Sony make incredible laptops. That’s a fact. As with all Sony products, it looks fabulous, is of excellent build quality, and has absolutely everything you need for life as a freelancing road warrior. It is billed as an “HD and entertainment laptop” on Sony’s web site, but with a 2.8Ghz, 1066Mhz FSB Core 2 Duo processor, it’s certainly no couch potato. This has all the power you need to rule the office by day, while the crystal-clear 18.4”, 1920 x 1080 resolution widescreen ensures that films and games are presented in full glory for the evening wind-down.
This beast of a machine is shipped with 4Gb of RAM, which is essential for keepingthe preloaded Windows Vista moving at a good pace. In terms of storage, it sports both a 500Gb magnetic hard drive AND a 128Gb SSD, meaning that you have the double bonus of both swift system speed and high capacity storage for music and HD films. For those of you using high-end graphics applications, you’ll be pleased to hear that it utilises the NVIDIA® GeForce® 9600M GT chipset with a dedicated 512Mb of GDDR3 RAM.
From my experience, this computer handles both top-level 3D and motion graphics applications with ease, which is a rarity amongst laptops. Other than that, it has all the usual high-end computing treats, such as TV tuner, built-in camera, Blu-ray, HDMI output, Wireless-n, and Bluetooth, meaning that there isn’t a device or format on this earth that this beauty cannot interface with except reel-to-reel tape.
The price? Well, we’re looking at one of the best laptops on Earth at this moment, and that kind of power doesn’t come cheap.If you buy from Sony they’ll charge you £2,500, with the attractive option of paying a little extra to be supplied without all the usual free software that is destined for uninstallation from the word ‘go’. However, you can save a fair few notes by picking one up from dabs.com for just under £2,280, an impressive saving of £220. Yes, either way this is a lot of money, but when other, lesser laptops become obsolete, break or simply lose their sparkle, this will still be standing tall for years to come. I am known to abuse laptops whilst travelling, yet each of my previous VAIO laptops has worked perfectly until it was eventually replaced by a newer model. My last VAIO lasted anunbelievable 5 years of being hauled round the world, until I inevitably dropped it once too often, prompting my latest splurge. When you are getting build quality like that, you can’t afford not to spend the extra.
To put it into perspective, an average workstation-level laptop will cost you at least £1000, but that doesn’t guarantee this level of build quality, and it certainly doesn’t get you the kind of extras that the VAIO carries. I can safely say that this machine will easily last twice as long as cheaper models, and in that time you’ll enjoy both working hard and playing hard on it infinitely more than one of its lesser rivals. Oh, and did I mention that its looks will be the envy of the whole office?
Check out the AW11XU/Q at sony.co.uk or dabs.com.