January 30th, 2008Review of Sony VAIO VGN-N170G
Sony’s N-series customer notebook has a cool, modest look that would fit completely in a modern living space or office. This moveable is a fine choice when your financial plan is modest but you don’t want your laptop to look like it. Obtainable in white, black, and Wedge brown (named after an African wood), the N series is a budget line that uses last year’s Core Duo chip instead of the Core 2 Duo, so it lags behind other new notebooks in presentation. The creamy-white Sony VAIO VGN-N170G that we reviewed had a 1.6-GHz Core Duo T2050 processor and 1GB of DDR2-533 SDRAM. With a World Bench 5 score of 85, it ranked below standard among currently tested universal notebooks, but its speed is fine for normal tasks. The VGN-N170G lacks a devoted video card, relying on integrated graphics instead; our test unit stopped up dead in its tracks both times trying to play Far Cry and Doom 3.
Acer has opened the new Ferrari 1100 series, the latest adding to the Ferrari-branded F1 notebooks obtainable by the PC manufacturer. With carbon fiber casing that maintains to be super-durable as well as stylish, the new laptops offers AMD Turion 64 X2 dual-core mobile technology, an ATI Radeon X1250 integrated 3D graphics card with up to 960MB of Hyper Memory driving a 12.1-inch WXGA display with Acer Crystal rite technology and a hard disk drive of up to 250GB.
