Sony VAIO PCG-K64

Staff Writers | Jun 9, 2004 12:00 AM

Sony |

RRP: $1999 (time of review)

Tough to recommend given the calibre of its competition, while Sony offer some nice functions like recovery disks, save your pennies and look at the more expensive better performing award winners.

Overall Rating:

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While Sony's VAIO PCG-K64 may not be the smallest form factor notebook in our roundup, it is pretty smart looking, with a large sloping lid and keyboard; it's comfortable to work on.

While Sony's VAIO PCG-K64 may not be the smallest form factor notebook in our roundup, it is pretty smart looking, with a large sloping lid and keyboard; it's comfortable to work on. Like the Toshiba Satellite, Sony has included a set of recovery CDs, allowing you to not just restore the original Sony factory defaults, but repair or restore partitions which have been damaged by the user. While keeping the unit under $2000 has resulted in the inclusion of a Celeron rather than a desktop P4 or Mobile Pentium processor, this is apparent when it came to performance results, the Sony taking last place in both PCMark04 and 3DMark01SE, the lack of SSE optimisation and additional L2 cache undoubtedly affecting performance. A fairly poor battery performance again downing the Sony in our testing, its only saving grace was its price - the unit finished third last overall. If you're willing to pay two thousand dollars, hold off and pay a little more and pick up a much better system in this months winner and recommended ASUS, Digital Star and MSI units.

This article appeared in the June, 2004 issue of PC Authority.