Two of Sony's latest Vaios - the TZ20 and SZ6 series - are carbon fibre-clad, 3G-enabled road-warrior weapons of choice. Rupert White and a Gazette guinea pig tried them out


It is an IT hack's tradition to write at least part of one's kit review on the kit being reviewed, to see how it copes with real use. Having used both the Vaio TZ and SZ for a couple of weeks it must be said that the SZ, on which this copy is being written, is a superior beast, but the TZ is perfectly usable as a document creator - a book introduction was rewritten and finished on it and no major hand injuries were sustained.



Sony's screens on the TZ and SZ are the glossy kind featuring on many newer laptops, and are backlit using LEDs rather than traditional methods. This makes them bright and sharp, as well as more energy-efficient.



Sony has also made a lot of hay out of using carbon fibre as a construction material in the SZ6 and TZ20 series reviewed here and the machines are light and feel much more rigid than one expects.





Great connections

Built-in 3G is the real innovation in these series, an addition Sony pitifully calls 'everywair'. Without this addition, until recently most laptops would be fairly useless outside the office, a Starbucks or an internet café. Now that wireless internet (Wi-Fi) is almost everywhere, built-in cellular technology seems less important, but it can still be incredibly useful.



One other feature point is that both these devices come with built-in fingerprint readers. Whether these ever really get used by most firms is a moot point, but being totally mobile increasingly means being properly secure, and so

these additions are most sensible.



Overall, we preferred the SZ: not just because it is more the typist's machine - and that is what we spend so much time doing - but because it just seems exactly the right size, is surprisingly light, and most of the normal Sony foibles (only providing memory slots for Sony products, and taking room with them that would be better used with more USB slots, for example) seem less of a bother because of the good design.



Either way the coin falls these Vaios are - as usual with Sony notebooks - comparatively expensive, as our guinea pig points out, though the TZ can probably be found for around £1,300. But though £1,300-£1,800 sounds like a lot of cash for a notebook, bear in mind that Mac fans will shell this out for a far heavier MacBook Pro, or a very light but gimmicky MacBook Air, which does not even possess a DVD drive.



The SZ would certainly give a Pro a run for its money in terms of stiffness, solidity and style, and is far lighter. To Sony, Vaios are premium design products and are priced accordingly. Whether they are worth it is more than any one review can say.





Always on with Vista

Our guinea pigs are truly fickle beasts, and ex-City partner Richard Stephens exemplifies the breed. The TZ he reviewed (opposite) is a surprising little machine - the screen does seem to belong on a toy and bends in a terrifying way, but it is pin-sharp and startlingly bright. Once the standard issue bloat - and spamware is removed, startup is not quite as bad as Stephens felt while using it, but it is still sluggish. But the reason for this is not really all the Sony-loaded rubbish - the reason is that Vista is not an operating system that enjoys being switched off and on.



The default Vista 'setting' for shutdown and startup is really 'hybrid standby', whereby the machine is put into a very low-power mode. From standby the TZ boots up quickly enough. To actually switch a Vista machine off it is necessary to go into a sub-menu - and most experienced users of XP know to pick hibernate instead for the same reasons of boot speed. The difference between Vista and XP on this front is that after a fair period of sustained uptime, XP would crash - a bug in the system.



Vista had this knocked out of it and has what Microsoft calls a hybrid sleep mode, where Vista talks to the innards of the PC and saves the memory to the hard drive but keeps the RAM alive - this takes only a tiny amount of electricity while the rest of the machine sleeps, but if you do happen to snap the battery off, your work is in the hard drive.



This delivers good startup times and good failsafes, but it means rarely fully turning off your laptop. Sorry, switch-off merchants.