Beautiful Sony Vaio SZ2M/B Laptop

I bought a new laptop.
I spent quite a while deliberating about which one to get, but eventually I got a Sony Vaio SZ2M/B.

Don’t you just love those sexy product names?

After carrying around my 3KG acer for almost a year, I decided that my next laptop would be a lot lighter and ideally, even more powerful. This wasn’t going to be easy.

There’s an interview with the engineers that created the laptop on the sony vaio site. They admit that they were thinking of going with a low power / low speed processor so they could keep the machine down to its target weight and size.

Here’s some specs:

Depth: 234.3
Height: 24.07
Width: 315.0
Weight with Supplied Battery and Supplied Drive
1.85Kg

On order to fit everything into these dimensions the engineers developed a custom webcam, sound chip and keyboard.
To reduce power consumption, the sound chip can be deactivated as can bluetooth and the wireless network card.

The laptop actually contains two different graphics chipsets. One is an intel onboard chipset which allows low power consumption, but there is also a dedicated nvidia geforce Go 7400 which gives enough 3d performance to play through games like Half-Life 2. Sadly they can’t be switched on the fly, but if I bring my laptop to a cafe I switch to ‘stamina’ mode, shut down and then bootup in the cafe and enjoy 4+ hours of battery life. I can flick the switch before I go home and enjoy a gaming session once I get back on AC power.

The dedicated graphics card works perfectly when running from the battery but it does cut the battery life down to around 2 – 2.5 hours.

The machine looks gorgeous and seems incredibly refined with an aluminium palm rest, carbon fibre lid and covers for the network and modem ports to keep out dust.

Sony even implemented a hard drive protection feature that detects acceleration and parks the hard drive heads so they don’t get damaged on impact.
I have no plans to test this feature

The laptop was designed and built in Nagano, Japan and as one of the engineers said about the features of the laptop:

All of these things take time and money, but we had them done anyway.

I’m really happy with my purchase and I’ve spent more time working since I bought it. This might wear off after a while but hopefully not. The keyboard is great to type with, the widescreen makes it easy to look at reams of code and carrying it to work and back is a pleasure.

I know this sounds like an ad but I’m just a happy customer.