A Laptop That Is Truly Worth Its Weight In Gold
Written: Jul 09 '02 (Updated Jul 12 '02)
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Pros: No major performance problems, generous 15" monitor, intuitive touchpad, ideal for gaming, ample HD space
Cons: Monitor tires eyes, a bit heavy, not suitable for DVD movie watching
The Bottom Line: Definitely a great laptop for either the novice or the expert. Ideal for word processing, gaming, web design, casual web browsing...basically anything. You will not be disappointed.
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| gene168's Full Review: Sony VAIO GR370 PC Notebook |
I purchased the Sony Vaio GR370 a month ago and have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of the product. After much use, I have found that the laptop has been far more than adequate for my daily use.
Design Although not very light(close to 7 pounds), the Vaio is not heavy and definitely is easy to carry around. The overall design of the Vaio is sleek and eye catching. The keyboard is a bit cramped, but this is the case with most laptop keyboards. The GR370 employs the use of a touchpad in place of the conventional desktop mouse. My main gripe with most laptops is their inferior touchpads or other options; however, the GR370 touchpad is quite intuitive and easy to learn how to use. There are two buttons underneath the touchpad to serve as the left and right click buttons, but there is also the option of tapping on the touchpad to click. Also, for web browsing, sliding a finger down the right side of the touchpad scrolls a webpage down. Despite the relative uselessness to me of the infamous jog dial at the bottom of the keyboard, the physical design of the laptop is clearly superior to other laptops out on the market at this point.
Speed and Performance The 1.13 GHz Pentium III processor of the Vaio has been sufficient for my use. I mostly use the GR370 for web page design, graphics design, word processing, and gaming use. I have not encountered any scenarios in which I have felt the computer “lag,” except when I had Photoshop, Internet Explorer, AOL, Musicmatch Jukebox, Adobe Pagemill, and Microsoft Word open all at the same time. However, I do not expect the average user to have that many programs open at once, and I never do either, except this time as a test of the Vaio’s capabilities.
The RAM and hard drive space of the laptop is ample. I have yet to surpass the halfway mark of filling up my HD(30GB) and have never encountered an instance in which the 256 MB of RAM was not sufficient.
The DVD drive was the only aspect of the laptop that I found to be a bit disappointing. I intended to make use of the DVD drive to watch some DVD’s while on the road but have found that movies don’t often play smoothly. Also, watching DVD’s saps the battery, which normally runs for about 3 hours of normal use. Watching a DVD reduces the fully charged battery life to roughly 2 hours, which is not sufficient time for many movies.
Miscellaneous details:
*The display is a generous 15” and the color, although not very rich, is similar to the quality of a decent desktop monitor. Although this may be just an isolated problem, I have found that my eyes become tired after an hour or two of work with the GR370. This does not happen to me when using my desktop and definitely has become an annoyance.
*I have opted for an optional USB optical mouse that has been a huge improvement over the touchpad. Although the touchpad was adequate, using a mouse is much more comfortable. Only when space doesn’t permit do I use the touchpad nowadays. Purchasing a mouse is essential for any laptop.
For the Gamer When I first started using my GR370, I salivated as I pondered over the gaming possibilities. I have not been disappointed since that day. I started off playing games that did not require much in terms of system requirements(Warcraft 2, Starcraft, CounterStrike). Just this past week, I purchased Warcraft 3 – one of the higher end graphics games that just came out this past week. I had already heard from some of my friends that the play was choppy for their computers and that some had encountered problems with the compatibility of the game and their graphics cards so I figured this would be a good test of the abilities of Vaio.
The game has run smoothly with barely any problems. The only notable gripe that I have is that after an hour or two of gaming, the computer beings to “lag up” a bit. (Just a side note: Warcraft 3 is an awesome game. Blizzard has truly done it again.)
The Verdict Definitely a good buy for the price. This laptop has performed far beyond my expectations. I was reluctant to purchase another laptop after a dreadful experience with a Dell laptop, but I could not be happier with the Sony GR370.
Thanks for reading my review!
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1559
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 15
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 21-30
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Epinions.com ID:
gene168
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Location: San Francisco, California
Reviews written: 17
Trusted by: 7 members
About Me:
Just an average guy sharing his opinions with the world. Feel free to comment!
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