Digital Trends

Sony VAIO VGN-A160

August 18th, 2004 | by Ian Bell

Setup and Use

Setting up the A160 is relatively easy, just follow the setup prompts and enter your information. Once we went through the MS Windows setup process, we were greeted by more preinstalled software than we had ever seen. It's as if Sony's marketing team went on a shopping spree, selling as much hard drive space to software vendors as possible. There is so much software preinstalled on the system that it takes an excruciatingly long time to boot into Windows. And once you're in, you can't go long without getting some sort of pop-up reminding you to pay or register for their software. Normally, computer manufacturers choose one vendor per software type, but not Sony. They have different brands of the same type of software installed. For example, our system came with both McAfee and Norton Antivirus programs installed, Microsoft Office 2003 trial and Works 7.0 software, Internet explorer and Netscape etc. They even preloaded the Google toolbar to show up in your web browser. There comes a point where when enough is enough. Its software preloads like this that can ruin a nice system. We've always thought that part of owning a Sony is the great user experience and Sony has hurt this a lot. We uninstalled a lot of the software which we did not want to use and moved on. No doubt you'll want to do the same.

The A160 runs incredibly quiet for a system of this size. This is due to their decision to go with a Centrino based chipset and Pentium M processor. We noticed that the A160's 4000mAh battery pack is physically smaller than batteries we have seen from other manufacturers. It could be the size of this battery which also helps contribute to the systems relatively cool touch. Both Gateway's 200XL and Apple's Powerbook line can get so hot when in use that you cannot set it on your lap; the A160 never seems to heat up to that point.

Another feature the A160 has is Sony's patented Xbrite technology which is used in the system's LCD display. The Xbrite display has a smooth plastic feel to it when compared to other LCD displays. It also helps to increase the screen brightness and quality of the colors without any sort of fading or wash out. In fact it reminds us a lot of Polaroid sunglasses. Light reflection is minimized to an extent and the richness of the colors are enhance. Black levels are also darker than notebooks without this technology. Sony's 15.4-inch widescreen display is capable of displaying HDTV resolution up to 1,920 by 1,200 resolutions, and if you have an HDTV in the house, you should be able to playback movies onto your home theater system using Sony's AV Entertainment Dock which features both VGA/ DVI and SPDIF outputs.  We first saw Sony's Xbrite technology used in their small TR1A laptop system, and we are glad they chose to bring it over to their other notebook lines.

Speaking of the AV Entertainment Dock, this is one of the most useful docking ports we have seen in any system. Not only does it have four USB ports on it, but it also has multiple video in and out ports allowing you to seamlessly use this system with your camcorder, or other home theater components. Using Sony's VAIO software, the company boasts that you can use the video inputs on the AV Dock to record TV shows and other video to the system, much like a personal video recorder. We were not able to test this feature in time for our review, so if you have advanced experience with the Sony software and AV dock, then please post it in our forums.