Sony VAIO® VGN-FE770G PC Notebook

The Sony VAIO VGN-FE770G Notebook comes with the new Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a 120MB hard drive. A lot of processor power and hard drive space for storage. On top of that is a slim, lightweight notebook with a beautiful widescreen display. The notebook measures 14.4 inches wide, by 10.8 inches deep, by 1.39 inches thick and weighs 6.17 pounds.

The VGN-FE770G is also loaded with 1 Gigabyte of DDR2 memory at 533MHz. (512MBx2) The 120 MB hard drive is a Serial ATA drive running at 5400-rpm. (revolutions per minute) There is a built-in camera and microphone. The color display measures 15.4 inches with 1280 x 800 display in the widescreen mode, which lets you see more on the page.


The Strong Points
The Intel Core 2 Duo processor T5600 (1.83GHz) is a good choice for an Intel chip. The processor has 2MB of L2 Cache on-board. I prefer an AMD 64-bit dual core processor because of a better price and they seem to perform faster then the Intel chips.

The 1 Gigabyte of DDR2 memory at 533MHz is a very good choice for speed, performance and plenty of memory to run all the applications. It is expandable to 2GB maximum.

I love the widescreen color display on the notebook; it has brilliant colors and is crystal clear. The LCD screen has XBRITE-ECO LCD technology to give movies better color purity and saturation, even in bright light. It is powered with an integrated 128MB video, which is shared from the 1GB of on board memory.

The VGN-FE770G has a built-in 802.11a/b/g Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) Wireless Networking Adapter; this is a nice feature on any notebook. With Wi-Fi you can connect wirelessly at many places that offer free wireless connections, like some airports, colleges and hotels, plus you can use it wirelessly between your home computer if it is equipped for it. Some of the cell phones today are starting to include Wi-Fi like the UtStarcom 6700, which can communicate with this notebook.

The DVD reader/writer is a nice addition with 4x DL DVD+R/-R, and 8x DVD+R/-R, with 6x DVD-RW, 8x DVD+RW and 5x DVD-RAM. It also has 24x CD-R and 16x CD-RW. A nice veritable reader and writer that should satisfy all you needs.

There is a multimedia card reader built-in that supports many of today’s cards. This makes it easy to pop out your digital or MP3 memory card and plug it in the notebook for fast use.


The Weak Points
The biggest weak point to the Sony VAIO VGN-FE770G Notebook is the hard drive. The choice of using a Serial ATA drive is good verses an IDE because of a faster transfer rate, but 5400-rpm is the slowest of the speeds, they should have at least used a hard drive with a speed of 7200-rpm. This slows down the performance of the whole computer. My choice would have been a 7200-rpm 16MB SATA-300 hard drive or one of the newer 10K rpm hard drives.

The video having to share the on board memory is not what I would consider performance. 128MB of it’s own dedicated memory would be much nicer and for gamers 512MB of dedicated memory would be nice.

The built-in speakers like on all notebooks do not have enough of a bass sound. There is an Audio Enhancer for making sound adjustments to your pleasure. Attaching an external speaker system with a nice subwoofer is the way to go for gaming, watching movies and music playing.


Other Features
A Lithium ion battery for about 5.4 hours of usage.
One year of warranty
Network Card 10Base-T/100Base-TX
Modem Integrated V.92/V.90
Included AC adapter
667MHz FSB
PCMCIA/PC-Card connection
There are three USB ports
One Firewire port
Intel 945GM chipset


My Thoughts
The Sony VAIO VGN-FE770G Notebook looks good, is very slim and designed well. The performance is good, but I feel like AMD still has an advantage over Intel when it comes to speed for the Internet, gaming and complex graphics. The notebook is easy to use, especially the built-in mouse pad, even though when possible I like to plug in a regular 3-button mouse.

Included is a copy of Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 with Update Rollup 2 and WinDVD, Roxio DigitalMedia SE, Sony software suite, plus more. Also included for a 60-day trial period is Microsoft Works 8.5 and Norton Internet security. The media edition is geared more for gaming and music, but can be used in the business world. Microsoft works is a basic of Microsoft office, good for the home user, but I do prefer MS office myself. Roxio is all right, but here again I prefer Nero for my media burning and listening pleasures.

Gaming is great with plenty of speed and performance; I do recommend an outside set of speakers for a better sound and a plugged in mouse for better control. Video performance form a DVD provide excellent picture quality, with an added speaker system the sound is awesome. Without an added speaker system, movies just seem to have too much treble sound, which takes away from the movie action. Internet surfing is smooth on broadband with good color and clarity.

The battery is rated at 5.4 hours, well at about 5 hours the notebook warned me that it needed to be recharged; I played with it for about 15 more minutes before it died on me. It wasn’t too far off; it took over 4 hours to fully recharge.

The built-in camera does a fair job, nothing special, about like any low cost add-on camera. The built-in microphone does a fair job; there is a port to add an external microphone. There is also a port for connecting a set of headphones.

The DVD reader/ writer worked flawlessly, I burned a couple of DVD-R and CD-R discs without any problems. The player read my save MP3 files without problems and they sounded great!

The hard drive is a little slow, but with 120MB of storage, it should have plenty of space for all your needs.

Overall I would recommend this notebook because of the storage space, descent speed performance and a beautiful colorful screen that give you life like with movies. This is a nice notebook for the home and office.


Recommended:
Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 1299
Operating System: Windows
Screen Size: Greater than 15 inches
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): Over 50