It’s been too long since I did a laptop review, so I’ll begin to remedy the situation with the Sony VAIO GRT260G. It just got an enthusiastic endorsement from Bill Howard in PC Magazine— about all he didn’t like about it was the fact that you need to carry a PC card adapter with you if you want to read CompactFlash and Secure Digital media.
The VAIO GRT260G is a desktop replacement-class laptop for people who want the closest thing they can get to a
17-inch Apple PowerBook at least from a video playback perspective, but still want to be running Windows XP. It weighs just over 9 pounds with the optical drive installed. This makes it over 30 percent heavier than the 17-inch PowerBook. The VAIO comes with a 16.1 inch SXGA+ LCD display in a 4:3 format that excels at displaying TV broadcasts captured by its integrated TV tuner. The display is driven by a 64 Megabyte nVidia GeForce FX Go 5600 3D video accelerator. This laptop also looks good playing back DVDs, with very good contrast and brightness.
Everyone who buys a laptop this big has to have a good reason. I mean, people have gotten used to seeing smaller ones, so yours better draw a crowd. What can this one do that other laptops will have difficulty matching? The first thing I can think of is good quality TV reception. You get a pretty sharp image out of the built-in TV tuner. This stands in contrast to a lot of aftermarket tuners that for any number of reasons don’t seem as well integrated with the laptop or PC that they were bought for.
This VAIO makes the Giga Pocket PC-based Digital Video Recorder software look good. I hadn’t really taken Giga Pocket seriously before I saw it work on this laptop. I think people who are serious about time-shifting TV will still prefer TiVo over Giga Pocket on a laptop, but for occasional use, this software and hardware combination is handy.
The GRT260G is chock full of storage and connectivity options. It has an 80-gigabyte hard drive, a DVD multiformat rewritable drive, wired and wireless networking, as well as USB, FireWire, and Flash Memory connectors. This VAIO also takes advantage of Sony’s Click to DVD authoring application to produce DVDs in a fairly foolproof fashion.
This laptop is designed to be a traditional computer, not an appliance. As such, it runs Microsoft Windows XP Home, or XP Pro by special order. Some of the reviews I’ve read say that it would have been better had this laptop shipped with the Media Center Option on it, but I disagree. I can’t imagine using a laptop in a traditional way if it has Microsoft’s software designed to turn a PC into a home theater component. Your mileage may vary on this one.
Finally, the GRT260G has a 2.8-Gigahertz Pentium 4 with 512 Megabytes of RAM in it. This is fast, but people who review systems like this all the time say that some early models have unimpressive performance from an office use perspective. I have trouble making that judgement, because I mostly use slower machines running Windows 2000 and Red Hat Linux.
I think I still want a PowerBook G4 for my next laptop. But, if I had my heart set on running Windows natively, I’d definitely consider the Sony VAIO GRT260G. It’s a lot of machine for the money.