Sony VAIO PCG-818 Pentium II 300 Notebook

Looking at its underside, the PCG-818 has very little to hide. Unlike the cheaper design of most no-name Pentium laptops, there are no air-vents on the underside of the PCG-818. Then how does the processor get cooled? Through the sides of course. The intake/exhaust from the CPU fan is directly above the microphone input jack on the left side of the laptop, allowing you to rest the notebook on your lap, or even a carpet without having to worry about getting enough air in to cool the system. Be warned, after 45 minutes of continuous usage the bottom of the PCG-818 became quite hot and although the system did not grow unstable, to be on the safe side you'll probably want to place it on a less heat-retaining surface than carpet for prolonged usage.

There are two access points to the motherboard inside the case of the PCG-818 on its belly, one being access to the 2.5MB of installed video memory and the other being an empty SO-DIMM (Small Outline Dual Inline Memory Module - essentially a smaller version of the DIMMs used in desktops) SDRAM bank for system memory upgrades. The system AnandTech tested came equipped with 64MB of SDRAM, and is upgradable to 192MB with an additional 128MB SO-DIMM. At the time of the review Sony was not offering any upgrades for the PCG-818, and an inquiry to Sony's sales line received a response that AnandTech should try contacting third party memory vendors about upgrades. This provides two disappointments, the first one being that there is only a single DIMM slot for expansion (so if you upgrade, you better make it count), the second being that Sony's sales staff was essentially clueless about the type of memory used by the PCG-818 and wouldn't even give AnandTech a model number. At the time of the review most online vendors only carried memory upgrades for the Pentium MMX modules of the VAIO laptops, and not the PCG-818, however in time Sony should begin to offer the upgrades as well as online vendors.

Turning on the PCG-818 revealed a fairly quiet operation and a relatively short boot-time of under 30 seconds. The clicking of the keys on the keyboard can be quite annoying, even when touch-typing, however the overall operation of the PCG-818 could be considered to be generally quiet and nonchalant. The greatest noisemaker seemed to be the DVD-ROM drive while spinning up, however after it started going everything returned to just about normal.

If all you're going to be doing on the system is word processing, you can use Sony's included PowerPanel power management utility to power down the CPU to a slower speed, and to decrease power to components such as the LCD backlight. Also, as you decrease the CPU speed, the CPU fan will shut itself off and turn itself back on when needed, decreasing the amount of noise generated by the already quietly humming PCG-818. The PowerPanel utility is accessible from a hidden bar on the right hand side of the Windows 98 desktop or through the system tray, and is fully configurable to suit your personal needs.

Around 500MB of the 6.4GB Toshiba HDD was occupied out of the box, leaving a little under 6GB free for AnandTech to play around in. One of the great advantages to having a Pentium II 300 under the hood is excellent performance under Windows NT, making the PCG-818 the ideal Windows NT workstation while you're on the road. You have to keep in mind that the Pentium II 300, even though it is a mobile solution, still have 512KB of L2 cache running at 150MHz, giving it a huge performance advantage over its K6-2 competitors in the mobile NT field. Unfortunately the laptop did not ship with NT drivers for either the sound or video devices, leaving you with a bit of searching to do on-line before your mobile NT powerhouse can be fully functional. Luckily NeoMagic can be reached via their website at www.neomagic.com, so the journey for drivers isn't as futile as you might expect.

The on-board V.90 56K modem comes in quite handy when you're stashed away in a hotel room far away from any high speed internet connections. The jack is placed on the right hand side of the laptop next to the two 32-bit PC Card/Cardbus compatible slots, and since the modem is built into the laptop that frees up one of the otherwise occupied PC Card slots for use with an Ethernet card, Flash memory upgrade, or anything else you can think of using it for.

The beautiful 13.3" XGA screen runs natively at 1024 x 768 x 16-bit color, which was what the PCG-818 shipped at and it produced vibrant colors while staring directly at the screen at that resolution. Unfortunately there was a bit of white fading around the corners of the screen, and the screen, like most LCD screens, became virtually invisible when viewed at an angle. Although you could consider that a privacy feature to prevent people from looking over your shoulder, it is definitely an annoyance to those that can't assume a straight forward position for prolonged periods of time while working on a laptop. A problem with active matrix LCD screens is the lack of a standard, perfected manufacturing process, so there will be cases in which your LCD may have one or more pixels turned on by default. This is simply a manufacturing error and can be expected with active matrix displays. Usually you'll find no more than 2 or 3 pixels which appear to be turned on at all times, for example, the PCG-818 AnandTech tested featured a single red pixel in the lower right hand corner of the screen that remained on at all times. Luckily the Windows 98 taskbar covered it up quite nicely, unfortunately chances are that not all PCG-818 owners will be that lucky.

Features such as brightness and contrast controls can be adjusted via a keystroke combination using the function key placed to the right of the left Control key on the keyboard. The poor placement of the function key does interfere with touch typing Windows keystroke combinations, i.e. ALT + F4 or CTRL + F4, and can get quite annoying at times if you consistently hit FN + F3 instead of CTRL + F3. The function key also allows you to mute the audio as well as control volume, two keystroke combinations that should be the first things you learn if you ever take the laptop into a public place. As much as the people sitting next to you love the Microsoft startup sound, chances are that they don't want to hear it blasting out of your speakers.

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