Gadgetory

hi I'm Scott Stein senior associate editor at cnet com and this is the sony vaio fw 480 JT laptop it's a retail configuration that's available at Best Buy and we're covering it as part of a all round lineup of laptops for our back to school special now what makes this machine interesting is that it plays blu-ray discs and it has a pretty wide 16.4 inch screen for 1199 you're also getting some pretty decent core2duo graphics and you're also getting an ati radeon card with about 512 megabytes of dedicated video memory so it can play games and it's pretty good at playing movies too and the design is pretty nice sony vaio has always have a pretty nice slick look to them and this one with its chocolate brand exterior and black interior has almost type of a macbook look to it it also has a raised keyboard which is pretty common across a wide variety of laptops now especially the sony vaios the computer weighs over six pounds so it's a little heavy however it feels nice and will pack up pretty flat the trackpad feels comfortable smooth standard trackpad nothing tremendously unique good click to the buttons and the keyboard has a nice feel to now sony also packages they are vaio laptop so the suite of proprietary video and music software music box which selects tunes for you and it also has a sort of a playstation like media launching bar which can be an alternative to Windows Media Center the fw 480 JT comes with 400 gigabytes in the hard drive and six gigs of ddr2 RAM which is pretty beefy and a nice option for a machine in this price ports are also pretty decent there's an HDMI port on the side there also happens to be a mini firewire port and there are three USB ports there's also a memory card slot in addition to a slot for Sony's proprietary memory stick media fold it over here you can see that actually the charging and the power button are inside the hinge charging happens over here and there's a glowing power button on the side here which happens to pulse in a pleasing little color tone when it's charging or it's in sleep mode for controlling the media functions there's no light up backlit bar here like on a lot of multimedia laptops instead there's a series of dedicated black buttons that are pretty understated at the top here right by the speakers the internal speakers while not being a full 5.1 speaker set have some pretty nice sound to them and they sound loud enough and crisp enough to be able to enjoy your movies pretty well and we have to compliment Sony I mean nobody does blu-ray better than them and the discs start up perfectly well there's instant play of them and there's no trouble with no problem setting up blu-ray playback whatsoever which does happen on some laptops in terms of energy use the vaio 480 JT also perform really well it only cost in our tests about 12 and a half dollars a year to operate which was the best among all of the high-end multimedia laptops that we tested her back to school roundup we like the vaio 480 JT the best out of all three and if you see it in a store and you want to get something that plays blu-ray movies and can play games and can be a pretty decent all-around machine you can't really go that wrong with this machine I'm Scott Stein and this is the sony vaio fw 480 JT laptop