Sony Vaio PCG-FX950
Sony products have a reputation for style in terms of visual design; whether or not you like an individual product, you usually can't help but be bowled over at how cool the casing looks. In the case of the Sony Vaio PCG-FX950, we suspect it must have gone past Sony's design team on a Friday, as there's a half hearted effort to make the unit look snazzy by some seemingly random purple plastic. The effect isn't pleasant to our eyes; we may find black notebooks dull, but dull beats ugly most of the time.
| Introduction |
| Acer Travelmate 223X |
| Apple iBook |
| Dell Inspiron 2650 |
| IBM ThinkPad R31 26562MM |
| Sony Vaio PCG-FX950 |
| Toshiba Satellite 1400 |
| How we tested |
| Benchmarks |
| Specifications |
| Editor's Choice |
The PCG-FX950 boasts the slowest processor of our Windows machines, a poky little Mobile Celeron 900MHz. We were therefore somewhat surprised that it somehow managed to pull itself up by its bootstraps and outdo the competition in our Productivity tests, where it beat out both the Acer Travelmate 233X and Toshiba Satellite 1400. We were less impressed, however, with the battery performance, where the Vaio came dead last every time. It only managed 133 minutes in our Productivity battery tests, and 163 minutes in our Reader tests. To put that in perspective, the next worst notebook, the IBM Thinkpad R31 26562MM, managed 212 minutes. This isn't a notebook you'd want away from a power supply for any extended period of time.
In terms of standout hardware, the Vaio is one of only two of our budget notebooks to ship with a combo DVD/CD-RW drive, and the only Windows machine to come with inbuilt firewire, although it is Sony's less impressive four pin i.link variant, which requires an adapter for most devices and doesn't supply a power line.
The keyboard is pleasant enough to type on; not quite as good as the Toshiba 1400 keyboard, but certainly workable.
From an upgrading perspective, our only concern was that according to Sony's website specifications, the Vaio is maxed out at 256MB of memory; that's what it comes with and the maximum it can support.
The Vaio may not have impressed us with battery life, but it does boast the most complete third party software library of any of the notebooks in our roundup. Apart from purely Sony applications like PictureToy and SonicStage, you also get full versions of Adobe Photoshop Elements and Norton AntiVirus 2002.
Sony Vaio PCG-FX950
Company: Sony Australia
Price: AU$2,799
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: 1300 13 7669
