Sony Vaio A Series VGN-A190 Review by LAPTOP Magazine

Name a feature you wish your next notebook could have: DVD burner, flash memory card reader, widescreen display, wireless network adapter. These are just some of the amenities you'll find on Gateway's M675X laptop, a 17-inch notebook that can go toe-to-toe with desktop machines three times its size.

Compared with other notebooks, the M675X is anything but thin and light. Measuring 10.6 inches deep and 1.5 inches thick, this system will occupy 15.8 inches of your desktop and weighs nearly nine pounds. With its beefy, 1.5-pound AC adapter, you'll be lugging more than ten pounds of equipment in your carry-on.

Although it's fine for the occasional trip, the M675X is really meant to replace that bulky, underpowered tower PC in your home or office. The first feature to bear that out is its huge 17.1-inch widescreen display, which offers a native USXGA+ resolution of 1680 x 1050-pixels.

If you frequently use applications like Photoshop or Excel that place large amounts of data or toolbars on the screen at once, you'll love this high resolution. Of course, it also proved outstanding for watching DVD movies in their original letterbox formatting. This resolution also works very well for word processing and Web browsing, since you don't have to scroll up and down so much.

Owners of this Gateway will also love the full-sized keyboard with a separate numeric keypad, in addition to a large touchpad with a scroll wheel placed between the left and right buttons. The included copy of Microsoft Works 7.0 will let you hit the ground running.

This laptop is powered by a 3.2-GHz Intel Mobile Pentium 4 538 processor. Combined with 512MB of DDR memory and a 5,400-rpm hard drive, the Gateway M675X offered excellent performance in every application tested. Largely because this version of the Pentium 4 processor offers Hyper-Threading, which makes it appear to Windows as two separate CPUs, multitasking proved no problem for this machine. We encoded a CD into WMAs while editing a 5-megapixel image in Photoshop without any problems. In the productivity-oriented PCMark04 benchmark, the system scored a terrific 4,595, which is very close to what the fastest desktop PCs can offer.

The M675X is very well equipped for high-end tasks like digital video editing and 3D gaming. Besides its outstanding display, this laptop offers a FireWire port to connect a DV camcorder, a DVD-RW drive to burn your own home movies, and a blazing 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics processor for 3D gaming. The system also features a multiformat flash media reader that can access CompactFlash, SmartMedia, Memory Stick, Multi-MediaCards, or Secure Digital cards, giving you an easy way to transfer images from your digital camera.

Then there are the integrated Fast Ethernet port and 802.11g adapter. As if all this weren't enough, the system looks cool, too, thanks to the bright blue LEDs that surround each of the buttons above the keyboard, which include the large power button, four one-touch program buttons, and a Wi-Fi power switch.

We found that switching off the Wi-Fi adapter added 21 minutes to the M675X's battery runtime, taking it from a fairly limited 2 hours to 2 hours and 21 minutes. In exchange for drawing so much power, the Wi-Fi adapter offers outstanding data throughput that reached more than 15 Mbps at 50 feet from our access point.

Although the system's standard warranty is just one year, you can upgrade to a three-year plan with onsite service for $239, or a four-year plan for just $299. Even without these upgrades, we think this is a terrific buy for anyone who desires a fast desktop replacement with superior graphics and a larger-than-life display.

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Sony Vaio A Series VGN-A190

An impressive all-in-one entertainment system.

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