SONY VAIO VGN-CR220EW REVIEW

Introduction
This laptop is aimed for mostly college students. The VAIO CR is available with a full range of Core 2 Duo processors (from the Intel T7100 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo up to the T7700 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo). The only screen offering is the 14.1" WXGA but the notebook can take up to 4GB of RAM. Built-in wireless 802.11 a/b/g/n is standard.

Design
It is easy to see that this laptop was first designed to look nice the surface is white and glossy with big silver letters on the top spelling “VAIO”. It actually looks quite much like the MacBook’s from Apple. This is a quite thin and light laptop with the weight of 5,5 pounds and height of 1.67 inch at its thickest.

They keyboard and touch pad are of good quality and the keyboard looks very much like the keyboard you find on Apple’s MacBook. The keyboard is very solid with no flex whatsoever. The touch pad is very responsive and the mouse buttons are big and easy to press. The VAIO CR also features dedicated media buttons at the front of the notebook beneath the touchpad buttons. Here you can turn the volume up and down, turn on your webcam etc. On this laptop you will also find connection facilities like 3 2.0 USB ports, FireWire, SD card reader, MemoryStick Pro reader, ExpressCard 34 slot.

Screen
The screen is a glossy 14-incher which can run a 1280 x 800 resolution with excellent colors and contrast. Horizontal viewing angles are excellent, so it would be no problems for you and your friends to watch a DVD on it. However the vertical viewing angel is very bad and makes it hard to lee low contrast details.

Performance
This beauty comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz T7100 processor which means there is nothing wrong with the performance of this computer. It also comes with 1 or 2 GB memory. The bad thing about this laptop is that the graphic chip is really bad compared to the huge processor. For graphic you will get an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100 so you will not be able to play the newest games anyway. On PCMaek05 we got 3,612 points and on 3dMark05 we got 782 points.

Overall
Sony did a great job with this notebook, the only bad thing about is the graphic card being way too weak. However this laptop is aimed for the average student so probably there won’t be much gaming involved. Overall the laptop is great for students.

Pros
+ Very good design
+ Fast CPU
+ Solid and quality built

Cons
- Screen has bad vertical viewing angles

Value For Money

Our Rating