Sony Vaio E 17-inch: No touch in this big boy
Fancy an old-fashioned Windows 8 laptop with a giant screen? The 17-inch Vaio E is an old-school concept in a new world of PCs.
Filling out the middle range of Sony's Vaio laptop lineup, the E series has been a venerable and reasonably priced zone for some decent budget and student-oriented computers. Amid Sony's fall bumper crop of Windows 8 PCs, a 17-inch E-series laptop has emerged. It's not touch screen, and it doesn't fold into a pretzel. This is a standard laptop, a desktop-replacement sort of 17-incher the likes of which aren't that common anymore, especially in the budget territories.
That being said, this E-series 17-incher isn't exactly "budget" at $979, but considering it has a 1,920x1,080-pixel display, a quad-core Intel Core i7-3632QM CPU, a 750GB hard drive, AMD Radeon HD 7550M graphics, and a Blu-ray combo drive, that isn't such a bad deal.
This is a more full-featured laptop than the 15-inch Vaio E we reviewed back in June, which cost $749, didn't have discrete graphics, and only had a DVD drive.
This isn't a lightweight machine, but at 6.6 pounds it's on the svelter side of 17-inch laptops. The white and black plastic design looks reasonably attractive, too, but it's a far cry from the blade-like futurism of most current Windows ultrabooks and transformable hybrids.
There isn't much more to say about the 17-inch E-series Vaio. If you like your laptops big screened and not over-the-top expensive, this could be one worth looking into. Stay tuned for a full review.