Sony's VAIO VGN-A790 - A Serious Desktop Replacement

The notebook is a very expensive edition to the Sony VAIO’s already pricy line, but is it worth having? If you're on the market for a desktop that you can fold up into a briefcase and lug around like a notebook, well, here's your man. The Sony VAIO VGN A790 is technically a laptop, but it offers the hardware for speed, power, and chutzpah to pull off any multimedia computing maneuver. Applications open up and run at the speed of light, and can do so even when more then one of them is open. We're talking a MobileMark score in the range of 240, including long disk writes and television burning. At 8.6 pounds the A790 isn’t light, but it is relatively thin at just 1.8 inches. The 17-inch XBrite screen, always a favorite, delivers a mind-blowing 1,920-by-1,200 resolution—great for photo editing, gaming, and watching movies, not to mention an ATI Radeon X600 graphics card and 256 MB of dedicated video memory.

The Sony VAIO VGN-A790 ($2,799.99 direct), the update to the VAIO VGN-A690, is undoubtedly the most powerful machine in Sony’s laptop lineup. Its exterior is unchanged–same gorgeous 17-inch display, same ultrathin chassis. Inside, the updates are minor; a boost in processor speed and more graphics memory. Sony also keeps the VAIO Zone suite, a worthy adversary against Microsoft’s Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE). All in all, the A790 is an impressive media-center laptop.

The A790 comes with a 2.0 GHz Pentium M 760, 1GB of DDR2 RAM, and the ATI Mobility Radeon X600 graphics card with 256MB of memory. With a faster processor than the Qosmio G25, it earns higher SYSmark 2004 SE scores. The A790’s MobileMark 2005 results were a modest 1 hour 55 minutes. Sony should probably offers a battery bigger than the standard 44-Wh one, but then again, it’s unlikely you’ll be lugging the 8.6-pound A790 far from a power source. Gaming, something Sony usually falls short on, is actually quite decent on this system, but the A790 still lagged behind the Qosmio G25 on our Doom 3 and 3DMark 2005 tests.

The question isn’t what Sony’s VAIO VGN-A790 does, so much as, what doesn’t it do? This multimedia monster rivals most fully loaded desktops, with a 2-GHz Centrino CPU, a full gigabyte of memory, and a glossy 17-inch widescreen display. You also get a docking station with a built-in TV tuner, so you can record your favorite shows onto the 100GB hard drive, and a set of external speakers. With so many parts required to get the full experience, you may be better off buying a slim desktop or a notebook with a TV tuner built in.

What are such desktop-like numbers good for in a notebook? Well, for one, you could place the VAIO A790 in its TV tuner stand, with its external speakers tagging along, and record some of your favorite cop dramas onto the 100 GB hard drive. The TV tuner can download channel schedules, as well as pause and record live shows like TiVo can. While you're watching Starsky and Hutch grilling Huggy Bear, you won't be disappointed with the 17-inch widescreen with UXGA 1,920-1,200 default resolution.

Or you could tap into the multimedia software suites for playing, recording, and editing basically anything with words, music, and/or images in it. Sony's VAIO Zone software connects all of these apps together much like, though not as well as, Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition. Then burn up to 8 GB worth of your home DJ masterpieces onto a DVD for safe keeping with the double-layer read-write player.

Nevertheless, the first time you try to type a little old-fashioned e-mail on the massive screen-or try to carry the monster around-you may begin to wonder the worth of such a massively equipped laptop. You may end up just leaving the beast on your desk at home for hardcore multimedia work, and carry around a smaller laptop for everything else.