The VAIO SB series of 13 inch laptops from Sony is a more economical alternative for budget conscious buyers who can’t quite afford the bells and whistles of the VAIO Z series or the slimmer SA series from the company. The notebook offers a decent set of specs for its cost along with a good keyboard, a bright display, a well-built design and good battery life. Here is a detailed review of the Sony mid-range notebook.
Appearance
The VAIO SB notebook borrows a lot from the earlier VAIO laptops which have been offered by Sony. It features the same familiar casing made of matte magnesium alloy and is available in pink, white and blue shades. The back features the same big logo for VAIO which is featured in all the notebooks of the range. There is a dedicated switch for activating or deactivating the Wi-Fi and another for switching between the two performance modes; speed and stamina. The DC port and the power button glow green or orange when the laptop is asleep and turned on. On the whole, the laptop weighing 3.8 pounds feels very sturdy, even though the build quality might feel a bit uneven at times.
Performance
The configuration of the $999 notebook includes an Intel Core i5-2410M processor clocked at 2.3 GHz along with a 500 GB hard disk and 4 GB of RAM. The laptop features switchable graphics, an integrated Intel graphics solution is present onboard along with a Radeon HD 6470M with 512 MB of video RAM. The notebook, however, doesn’t feature the Optimus technology from Nvidia which means that even as the users will not need to reboot while switching graphics cards, they will have to do so manually and then wait for a couple of seconds for the change to take place.
All in all, the machine was able to handle multitasking pretty well with multiple tabs in Chrome and tasks such as chatting and browsing performed while downloading or installing programs at the same time without any lag. The boot time for the SB is 50 seconds, which is pretty good for any Windows 7 laptop, especially as it doesn’t run on an SSD. In terms of various benchmarks, the SB gets respectable scores; however, it doesn’t perform exceedingly well.
The battery life of the VAIO SB is impressive. The laptop runs for around 5 hours in stamina mode and 3 hours in the speed mode. However, with the addition of the sheet battery, these figures go up to 9 hours and 12 hours respectively.
Conclusion
Overall, the VAIO SB is an excellent buy for people looking for a well performing, lightweight and not too expensive notebook. The laptop is reasonably powerful and offers excellent battery life for the power it packs under the hood. Highly recommended for anyone looking for a capable laptop with decent looks on a low to medium end budget.
