Sony VAIO VGN-A160
August 18th, 2004 | by Ian Bell
Full Review - Features and Design
Features and Design The A160 is a relatively thin laptop when compared to its competitors, despite having a 15.4-inch widescreen display and a large keyboard. In fact it's at least a quarter of an inch thinner than the multimedia notebooks we found form the HP and Toshiba camps. But don't let its size fool you; the A160 still weighs in at a little over 8 pounds, without the external speakers and port dock. But for a desktop replacement, this is actually not that heavy. Sony decided to use a Centrino chipset and Pentium M 715 1.5GHz processor with 512MB of RAM in the A160. While this won't give the system the same horsepower that you would get out of a desktop system, it is perfectly acceptable for all of the A160's intended tasks. Memory is always a big influence with most of today's applications and at least Sony gave the A160 512MB of memory. And if that is not enough, you can always upgrade the system to 1GB. 80GB of hard drive space might be too small for some multimedia enthusiasts though, so you may want to add an external hard drive for more storage space. We checked out the A160's competitors and they all seem to come with 80GB drives, so there is nothing unusual about this — especially considering the price premium for 2.5-inch hard drives. For complete specs, click on the specifications tab and link located on the top and bottom of this review. The design and styling of the A160 is both unique and breathtaking. If Darth Vader had a favorite laptop, we are fairly sure that it would be the VGN-A series. The dark granite-like color and black highlights have been a cornerstone in Sony's designs lately; just like white has been for Apple. The color scheme Sony chose to go with this system works well. The dark colors make the system appear smaller than it really is and the downward sloping corners give the A Series a very distinctive look — there are no square corners on the entire laptop. Everything about the A Series is very clean as there are no knobs or buttons protruding. Sony hides a lot of the inputs and outputs behind covers which help ad to the smooth lines. The AV Entertainment Dock has every input/output you can think of
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by Kate McCormack on July 20, 2008:
“My VGN-NR110E had a faulty hard drive 28 days after I purchased it and their customer service is the worst I have ever received from any company. ” More...