Sony Vaio PCV-W1

Buying a Sony product guarantees you two things; a stylish piece of technological kit and a premium price tag. While the Vaio PCV-W1 exemplifies this notion, it also pits itself against Media Center-equipped PCs as an all-in-one home entertainment device.

Rather than your traditional PC, the Vaio PCV-W1 is built more like an Apple Imac, as everything, bar the mouse, is enclosed in a single unit. While this allows a simple setup - just plug in the power cord and mouse - its design does mean that there are no internal hardware upgrade options, apart from one memory slot.

However, as this PC is designed to store, organise and play your digital media files, its system specification needs to be very good, and it is. It has a 2.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor and 512MB of Ram, which combined to achieve a respectable score in our system tests. Digital audio, video and photos can eat away at hard disk space very quickly, so the 160GB hard disk is a welcome inclusion.

While the Vaio PCV-W1 is great for Windows applications, the same cannot be said of its 3D aptitude. Only 32MB of onboard graphics has been included, which means many of the latest games will struggle to play in high resolution or with advanced features turned on. An extremely feeble score of 1,509 in 3Dmark and an Unreal score of 14fps (frames per second) at a resolution of 1,024 x 768 illustrates just how inadequate the PCV-W1 is for 3D gaming.

Luckily, this flaw doesn't affect the main purpose of the PC, which is its ability to watch and record TV, play DVD movies and digital audio files, and organise a digital photo collection. Sony has designed its own software for each area of media, which isn't surprising considering its past record of creating its own software and hardware.

Each entertainment area can be accessed by using the mouse and keyboard or by using the supplied remote control. Music is controlled by the Sonicstage software which, apart from the interface, is a lot like Musicmatch Jukebox. Here you can arrange your audio files, rip tracks from CD, copy files to a CD or portable device, or stream audio from a networked PC.

Digital photos are organised by the Picturegear studio software, which allows you to import photos from digital cameras and memory cards, create photo albums and print pictures. The application likely to get the most use, though, is the Gigapocket software, to which our American cousins have been privy for a number of months. Put simply, it allows you to pause live TV and record programs just like a VCR, which can then be stored on the hard disk to be watched at a later date. Couch potatoes will enjoy this even more as it can all be carried out using the remote control. Sony's Click-to-DVD software will also allow recorded TV programmes to be burned to DVD using the integrated DVD-RW drive.

One main concern is the quality of the 17.5in widescreen TFT. It's certainly big enough to watch DVD movies comfortably, however the viewing angle is poor and you need to be sitting directly in front for best results. The image was also grainy, a problem that couldn't be resolved even after tinkering.

Although it may not offer any room for upgrades, it comes with three USB2 ports and mini Firewire for attaching external hardware. There's also video-out, TV-in, PC Card and Memory Stick slots. Making use of the audio out socket will also be preferential to using the integrated speakers.

Although the Vaio PCV-W1 looks good, it seems Sony's attempt to create its own Media Center hasn't come off. For the best results, connect it to a TV and 5.1 digital decoder, however, you may then ask yourself why you've just spent £1,500 on a device that has merely taken the place of your adequate DVD, VCR and home stereo.

Contact: Sony 0870 542 4424
www.sony.co.uk

Specifications:

• Windows XP Home
• 2.8GHz Pentium 4
• 512MB Ram
• 160GB
• DVD-RW drive
• 32MB integrated graphics
• 17.5in widescreen TFT