Portable Laptop Review: Sony Vaio VGN-Z598U

April 2009
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Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 @ 10:38 pm | Laptop, Review

This is a sleek little ultra portable laptop, and very light to boot. But this won’t be the first thing you notice – it’ll be the price tag. Starting at 1.5 k and ranging up almost to 5k, this is one expensive piece of hardware – you can get a used car for that amount of cash, or a really nice bike! It has a 12 by 8 inch screen and weighs 3 lbs, which makes it a little bit large for an ultra portable laptop.

One factor which raises the price is your hard drive option. You can equip this baby with a pair of 128 gig solid state hard drives. I’m so glad that this kind of technology is advancing – I think almost every computer and laptop I’ve used has suffered some kind of hard disc malfunction (but admittedly my usage is very intense). What’s great about these drives is that you can throw your computer across the room or hit it with a sledgehammer, and you’ll still be able to recover almost everything for the drive. One of my older laptops with a classic hard disc dropped on my foot – not even a heavy blow – and the hard disc became unusable. Recovering this can be done, but it’s unreliable and costs easily as much of your laptop itself. I’ll say it outright – I love solid state hard drives, and this one can come with a lot of solid state memory. It can also come with 4 gigs of ram and comes with a nVidia graphics card.

A cool feature of this graphics card is that you can freely switch between it and the integrated card – no reboot required. It also helps save battery life! Unfortunately, despite this option the battery life is only about 4 hours – not so good for an ultra portable laptop. Thankfully for a small-ish design the keyboard is nicely sized and usable despite my ham fists. I can safely say that anyone can use this keyboard with ease, but the buttons for the mouse are a little small for my liking. I do like how there are programmable shortcut buttons – added versatility is always a big plus for me. It is a little skimpy on extra ports, but at least it comes with Firewire and two USB jacks.

Unfortunately, the sound system on this machine is the place that was most cut. Don’t even bother with iTunes unless you have a good set of headphones. At least with this degree of power you should be able to use most programs with ease – I think this computer has great usage versatility. It’s especially good if you’re looking to protect your data – the solid state hard discs are a great option if you can afford them. So in conclusion it’s a great laptop but definitely a little high in price. It may be worth it for you though. Just be sure to back your stuff up – SS drives are much more reliable, but everything has a chance of failure.