Our review sample called FW-270j came with a Blu-Ray player, a reasonably fast 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo (P8400) CPU, integrated Intel graphics, 4GB of DDR2 RAM and lots of ugly stickers. Sure, stickers can be removed, but the fact that Sony decided to paste a “Full HD 1080p” on it is more than a little misleading, as the screen resolution is 1600×900.
Once we got over the sticker annoyance, the FW turned out to be a very pleasant experience. The keyboard and trackpad combination has all the qualities we expect from a VAIO. It also has a set of multimedia buttons, which also provide some added functionality with Sony’s proprietary media software, should you decide to use it.
The FW series is actually available with a dedicated GPU from ATI, which we would recommend as it would offload the processor while watching HD movies. However, our model had to make do with the integrated X4500 Intel chip, and this was reflected in the benchmarks. The Vista Experience Index scores were all high except for the graphics that pulled the score down to a mere 3.8 (the maximum in Vista is 5.9 for some reason known only to Microsoft). Running Futuremark’s PCMark Vantage gave us a score of 3235.
On the other hand the integrated graphics may have contributed to its decent battery performance. In general use the battery lasted more than 3 hours, and we could watch an entire 101 minute Blu-Ray movie on one charge.
To summarize, the Sony VAIO FW can easily be recommended to any movie buff, as it’s both great looking and quite reasonably priced. If you want any form of gaming capability, however, we would recommend picking one of the FWs with dedicated graphics.
source: http://laptoping.com/sony-vaio-fw-review.html
