Sony’s Vaio laptops aren’t perhaps best-known for their good value, but with an Intel Core 2 Duo P7450, Nvidia GeForce 230M graphics and a £699 price tag, this latest model seems to buck the trend. Sony Vaio VPCCW1S1E Sony’s VPCCW1S1E: terrible name, terrific looks Part of the CW series, the VPCCW1S1E might not have the …

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Thursday 10th December 2009 14:53 GMT Anonymous Coward

Cheaper Sony?

This is an Intel P7450 based machines. According to the Intel site here ...

http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=36734

...it says it doesn't support Intel Virtual Technology, (there's a Reg story on that and Vaio a few months back).

So it might be in for a struggle with XP emulation under Windows 7.

The Intel P84xx series chips are OK though but they're not in this part of the Vaio range and not at this price point. I found this last month when I looked at this machine for a friend. The Vaio experts at a flagship Sony Centre in central London weren't able to answer a question about whether it supported virtualisation or not. It took me a few seconds to find "no" on the Intel site.

So what of it? The intended user for this machine is a teacher and needs to run a lot of educational software, which is often built with not much more than 32 bit XP in mind, so decent XP emulation starts to matter. We had to say in this case she'd have a better chance of backwards compatibility with a Mac!

And as for the ones they've decked out in pink.... Ewwwww!

Value for money? Make up your own mind.

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1. Friday 11th December 2009 08:32 GMT Brian 6
  
  @AC 14:53 GMT
  
  Educational software designed to run under 32 bit XP will run fine in windows 7 so no need for XP emulation.
  
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2. Saturday 12th December 2009 11:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Intel Virtual Technology
  
  I was pleased to discover earlier this week that Sony had released an updated BIOS for my FW series machine that allowed me to enable Intel VT. Now, I just need an ancient and badly written app to test it with. So far the only thing I haven't gotten to work natively under Win7-x64 was a 16-bit game.
  
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Thursday 10th December 2009 14:53 GMT Anonymous Coward

Budget VAIOs

Not sure why Reg is so surprised by budget VAIOs. This isn't the first. Their NW, AR and FW series has always been affordable too. It is just their high end VAIOs tend to get more coverage.

Anyway good notebook. My mate bought it last week and it is pretty darn good value, has a good build quality (quite unlike cheap HPs and Acers) and can play most games.

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Thursday 10th December 2009 17:06 GMT Anonymous Coward

Cheap and nasty

i was looking at one of these, but the case plastic is thin and it looks cheap, glad i have a macbook pro, well worth the extra money.

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Thursday 10th December 2009 17:08 GMT Anonymous Coward

Re: Cheaper Sony?

Intel Virtual Tech? What is that?

Seriously, who cares?

Only geeks on Reg does. The rest of the world do not.

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1. Friday 11th December 2009 00:37 GMT Shades
  
  DO NOT...
  
  ...FEED THE TROLL!
  
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Sunday 13th December 2009 11:50 GMT Anonymous Coward

Cheap and nasty

i was looking at one of these, but the case plastic is thin and it looks cheap, glad i have a Ford Mustang, well worth the extra money.

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Monday 14th December 2009 00:52 GMT Anonymous Coward

But it's a sony

which means that within 2 years when the power brick fails, Sony will have stopped selling them and you will be tempted to buy a cheap nasty replacement from ebay (which only has a 2 week life expectancy).

Likewise a replacement battery from sony will set you back three quarters of the price of a new laptop with specs better than your current vaio.

The only sony product I like is the PS3 because it has ongoing support (only because they make more money from the online store and the game licensing than they do the physical hardware).

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