Gadgetory

hi I'm Scott Stein and windows 8 is almost upon us and what do you expect maybe something with a lot of touch with a lot of crazy folding origami shapes some sort of futuristic laptop well this isn't it this is the sony vaio 17 and this is an old-fashioned traditional Big Bone laptop that is seven pounds it is a 17 inch display it has 1080p resolution and a lot of upgrade options it starts at $650 which is pretty reasonable and if you want to go up to what this has our review configuration has a quad core Core i7 processor AMD graphics 750 gigabyte hard drive 8 gigs of RAM it comes in at about $1000 that's not bad for everything that it's got including a blu-ray drive so it's really soup to nuts pretty complete laptop so what's the problem well it's really not all that touch friendly now I never thought I'd say that because I don't really like the idea of touchscreen laptops yet but the fact is this trackpad is really small and Windows 8 is really designed for touch you really want to trackpad that's as large as possible and this one is not that small but compared to the amount of trackpad space that you've got available here and the fact that it's offset a bit to the left it's frustrating to use and it's inset and if you can see it here but it's actually a little bit lower it's not flush and if you're going to be doing one of those swipes for charms that comes off the edge of the trackpad when you use Windows 8 you'll know what I mean it's really hard to pull off on this now as Seth Rosenblatt and others have pointed out there are other ways to access the app tiles with in Windows 8 and swap between you can go up to the top of the screen you can use a keyboard command but I want to be able to do it the way I want to do it and that trackpad is holding me back and I think it would hold you back too now it's not enough to be a deal killer on this laptop but this really isn't anything inventive although it is a new product within the e-series that sony makes which is kind of a mid-range almost budget II line of laptops and not unattractive a kind of a nice clean white and black two-tone look very sleek looking but definitely not thin this is nothing that you haven't seen before and if you want to buy into something like that now regardless of those eight and you feel like you want to get a laptop that's got a lot of bells and whistles well this is it but how many people are asking for a big large screen laptop I'm not really and I don't know if you are either I'm Scott Stein and this is a look at the new Sony Vaio g17