Sony VAIO PCG-K195BP review

It's amazing the amount of background noise we put up with in the office, and the constant whir of a hundred notebooks and PCs is one of the main culprits - as soon as they're turned off, the world suddenly becomes a quieter and far more pleasant place. Sony's latest series of notebooks is riding on the back of this, as while it may lack top-of-the-range components or the finesse of some of its more expensive siblings, it's as quiet as a mouse.

Sony has decided that a silvery white and dark grey combination of colours is de rigueur this season, and will adopt it on the majority of notebooks it releases this year. To be frank, we're not convinced. We may not be fashion aficionados, and we admit that taste varies wildly, but previous models have seemed far more stylish and modern. It's hardly sleek either, weighing in at a massive 3.4kg and a whopping 58mm at its thickest towards the back - nearly as big as Dell's Inspiron 9100.

It lacks the power and many of the features of that behemoth, though this is understandable given the difference in price. Using a 2.8GHz desktop Celeron processor and 512MB of PC2100 DDR memory, the K195BP earned a rather pathetic 0.53 overall. Such a low score means that in comparison to today's notebooks, it really does feel slow in everyday use. This is evident in its frankly terrible score of 0.31 when challenged with word processing and spreadsheet tasks. Its progress on multimedia tasks was more impressive, though, as was its 2D graphics result.

3D graphics performance, on the other hand, is rather poor. The built-in ATi Radeon IGP 345M graphics produced a score of 1,232 in 3DMARK2001 SE. This essentially means that it's incapable of running any current games. It is good enough to play the odd DVD, though, and this is a particular pleasure thanks to the excellent screen. While it may only be capable of a resolution of 1,024 x 768, this 14.1in model is nevertheless impressive, thanks to its use of Sony's Ultra-Bright technology, formerly known as ONYX Black. This first appeared last summer and offers amazing colour reproduction as well as infallible brightness and crystal clear accuracy on text; it's so good that we hardly noticed the limited native resolution.

However, there is one irritation with this technology. Sony has added an LCD TV-like shine to it, so light reflects off the screen. This has a positive impact when watching films and playing games, but the extra light makes examining text-heavy documents quite a chore. For example, it was nigh-on impossible to use during a sunny train journey.

But this isn't the sort of notebook you'd like to take around with you anyway. First, there's the aforementioned bulk; you'll certainly notice it on your shoulder. Second, given the K195BP's mediocre battery performance, it's likely to remain chained to a desk most of its life. The eight-cell battery lasted less than an hour-and-a-half under intense use: a particular disappointment, as we'd have expected a more powerful battery inside such a large case. The battery is easily removable from the side. However, it's not hot-swappable, so you'd have to plug it in to change the batteries round, essentially defeating the purpose.

It's not all bad news, though, as Sony's claims that the K95BP is both cool and quiet are absolutely justified. Even after hours of heavy use, the K195BP was barely warm on our laps, and the only time we could ever hear the whir of any fans was when we put our ears right up against one of the vents.