Digital Trends

Sony VAIO NR160E/T

February 1st, 2008 | by Josh Norem

Use and Testing

Our initial impression of the NR is that it’s pretty and sleek. It seems a bit thinner than most 15.4” notebooks we’ve sampled. The specs say 1.2”-1.5”, so it’s certainly not a boat anchor, especially given its relatively low weight of 6.2lbs.

We booted to Windows and were immediately impressed by how bright and crisp the display was. It’s beautiful, and the glossy finish makes everything look sharp. The native resolution is 1280x800, which is decent for a 15.4” display.

Bloatware

We checked out the OS configuration and were dismayed to see how much bloatware (installed trial software) comes included with the system. Easily the biggest transgression is an animated AOL icon that sits on the desktop and is constantly changing colors and shapes. Here’s the whole list of either pre-installed or could-be installed trial software: Norton Internet Security 2007 trial, Microsoft office 2007 trial, AOL, AOL video, MS Works, SafeIT document shredder trial, Adobe Acrobat Connect trial, Intuit Quickbooks Starter edition, six casual games, Napster trial, LocationFree, Corel Paint Shop Pro XI trial, AIM 6.0, VAIO Click to DVD, Corel Snapfire, Roxio Easy Media Creator 9, SonicStage Mastering Studio, and finally there’s even more software in the various VAIO suites.

Look at all that software Sony has pre-installed. Wow.

That’s a lot of software, a ton of trialware, and basically a bunch of software that we would not want on our notebook. Adding insult to injury, Sony installed an AOL toolbar on Internet Explorer. And it also added a transparent “taskbar” to the desktop that is just above the regular taskbar. It lets you launch things like “VAIO Entertainment Center” which then lets you install all the trialware and such. Thankfully, you can easily disable this taskbar.

Sony includes a transparent “taskbar” on the desktop to make installing trialware easier.

Windows Performance

We haven’t tested a Vista system with just 1GB of RAM in a while, so we were surprised at how sluggish the system felt. Vista is a memory hog, and was consuming 738MB of RAM just idling at the desktop, with no programs running. With Vista’s SuperFetch program, which continually monitors what programs you use and adds their boot files to RAM, it’s easy to predict that Vista would eventually consume all 1GB of RAM available, which would seriously degrade the notebook’s performance.

1GB of RAM is fine for XP, but not for Vista. The NR was sucking down 738MB just sitting at the desktop.

Given its low amount of RAM, low-end processor and 5400rpm hard drive, performance was a bit of a letdown. It’s not that the system was insanely slow or that we grew a beard waiting for programs to open, just that it was more sluggish than what we’re used to. It’s by no means “slow” but it’s certainly not what we’d call “responsive.” Once again, adding more RAM would most likely improve this situation drastically. Its Windows Experience Index score is just 3.4, and was dragged down by the onboard Intel graphics.