Sony Vaio Z117 Series

A sure shot winner in the luxury segment, but not the greatest computing device in the market.

The oopmh factor is back. The Sony Vaio Z Series is now in a new avatar. It features a unibody aluminium shell covered with carbon fibre, and a full HD 1920 x 1080 pixel 13.1 inch-wide LED backlit TFT display with 96 per cent Adobe RGB coverage.

And it has two great features that no other PC manufacturer offers: a backlit keyboard similar to the MacBook Pro’s, and a dedicated switch to manage the high-speed graphic accelerator card from Nvidia. Weighing 1.41 kg, it runs on 4 SSD drives that give you 256 GB of storage, and it comes with 8 GB Ram. Since 32 bit editions of Windows can’t access anything over 3 GB of Ram, Sony ships the Vaio Z with the 64 bit edition of Windows 7.

All this is controlled by an Intel Core i7 processor. There’s also a three-year return-to-bench domestic warranty, with only the first year valid globally. But all’s not well with this otherwise beautiful and fantastic machine. The four solid state drives (SSDs) run in Raid 0, so if even one drive conks off, your data can’t be recovered. It is a high-performance machine and nice to look at too, but its battery backup is a measly five hours and it takes roughly four hours to charge (you can choose to buy the eight-hour battery pack). Bundled with this laptop is a noise-cancelling headphone from Sony, so that your plane trips are a bit more enjoyable. Get this if you want to be the envy of everyone on that flight.

PCSony Vaio