Sony Vaio PCG-R600HEP

A very light and portable addition to the Vaio family.

Price: £2000

Manufacturer: Sony

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Verdict

The Vaio has intelligent design, high build quality, portability and reasonable battery life, but the price, and the lack of drives which more or less forces you to buy the docking base as well, will be obstacles for many potential buyers.

Dominic Bucknall, What PC? 28 Mar 2002

It often gets left unsaid, but normal sized notebooks are not really very good for travelling around the place. They are portable, certainly, and this is convenient if you want to take work home of an evening, or have a machine handy for email when you're visiting relatives, but they are not really meant for carrying around wherever you go.

For that, you need a subnote. A decently designed subnote will be small enough to fit in a briefcase and should be at least a kilo lighter than a conventional portable, often less. This means pruning the conventional design right back in order to get the size and weight down as far as possible, and the Sony Vaio PCG-R600HEP is a fairly extreme example.

It has shed both its floppy and optical drives, leaving only the hard disk spinning away inside the case. If you want the services of either, you will be obliged to buy a separate docking base which houses both drives very neatly in its innards.

The docking base is nicely designed, and only adds about 1.1kg to the overall weight, so you can even transport it at a pinch, but it also adds £499 to the overall price.

Admittedly, this is a machine aimed at the business buyer but, even so, this is quite a hike, and it has to be said that at £2,000 a pop, the Vaio is far from cheap.

The other thing you might need the docking base for is ports, since the notebook only has its two USB ports and a FireWire (IEEE1394) connector, primarily useful for getting stills or video from a digital camera.

USB is OK for mice and keyboards, but you really need a parallel port as well, and it's on the dock, as is the VGA port necessary for plugging in a nice, big external monitor when you are working at home or in the office.

Of course, once you've got the docking base, coming and going is a snip, since all your peripherals are plugged into the base, not the notebook itself.

Subnotes need to be tough as well as light, and Sony has done a good job with the Vaio. The main body of the machine is made of lightweight alloy, which also helps radiate off excess heat and, when you pick it up, you can tell it will last. There's none of that tell-tale flimsiness which betrays badly engineered kit.

The keyboard is necessarily quite small, but it remains usable thanks to a tolerably large main pad and big Enter and Backspace keys. We'd always recommend an external desktop keyboard for really prolonged use, but you should get by well enough when you are on the road.

Similarly, the screen is not huge, but its 12.1in diagonal carries the 1024 x 768 resolution picture fairly well, although text is quite small. The biting crispness of TFT ensures that it remains readable though, and the side lighting is bright.

When it comes to communicating with the outside world, the Vaio has all the essentials. A 56K internal modem and fast networking adaptor are standard, but for the money we'd have liked to see wireless networking as well.

If you wanted to add wireless functionality, you could still do so easily enough using the single Type II PC Card slot, and if you own a camera or MP3 player which uses a Memory Stick you can take advantage of the Vaio's slot for importing stills or exporting downloaded music.

Battery life can be important if you are travelling, so we worked the Vaio to a standstill and discovered that it will keep running for up to two and a half hours under normal conditions, which is reasonably good going.

As for performance, the combination of a Pentium III 850MHz processor and 128Mb of memory will handle any normal business task without getting indigestion, although we'd suggest adding another 128Mb (the maximum possible) if you are going to be using Windows XP, which can be greedy where Ram is concerned.

That aside, the Vaio is powerful enough to do what it's designed to do: keep you working and in touch when you are away from base.

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