Sony VAIO PCG-K195BP

Sony is rather secretive about how this has actually been achieved. What we do know is that a system of heat pipes and fans, similar to that used in the original VAIOs five years ago, has been implemented: the pipes draw the heat away from the chip, and the fans then cool the pipes. Sadly, though, this method of cooling is restricted to Celeron and Pentium 4-based notebooks, hinting that it would be impossible to use this method on Pentium M chips.

The rest of the design is also good enough, given the VAIO's price. We found little fault with the keyboard; it's large, well laid out and offers good travel. The touchpad is an excellent model also, as it's large and very responsive.

The K195BP has enough ports to keep most people happy. Three USB 2 ports, a PC Card slot, a mini-FireWire and a parallel port offer plenty of options to expand, and a 10/100 Ethernet port and 56K modem allow connection to the outside world. There's also a D-SUB port, should the glare on the monitor become too much. Storage is well catered for thanks to a 40GB hard disk, and obviously we expect nothing more than the supplied combo drive - a DVD writer is too much to ask for. Finally, as you'd expect with a Sony product, a Memory Stick slot sits at the front.

The K195BP uses Windows XP Professional, which makes it suitable for an office environment. Also included is an Adobe Companion Pack. This impressively includes Photoshop Elements 2 and a reduced version of Premiere 6. But despite all this, the £850 asking price is still too high, particularly given its dire performance in office tasks. Granted, you'll always find yourself paying extra for the Sony brand, but little of the usual finesse and style can be found here. We'd rather put up with a little bit more noise, far superior performance and better set of features found in our budget notebook Labs winner, Dell's Inspiron 510m - it's simply better value.

Author: Mark Walsh