The Sony VAIO Y Series VPC-Y218FX is a stylish laptop which is trim and full of wireless connectivity options. It is built in a qualitative way and has a ULV processor in it.

Review

The good aspects of the Sony VAIO VPC-Y218FX are: wireless connectivity, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and mobile broadband. However, the bad points learnt about this laptop are: its built quality is not good and said to be below average. It doesn’t have an extraordinary battery life; it is quite costly and has an ultralow voltage CPU which restrains performance.

Design and Features

The Sony VAIO Y Series VPC-Y218FX is a trim laptop with a colorful cover, curved display axes and a remote keyboard. It includes features such as Wi-Fi, mobile broadband, Bluetooth and wireless connectivity with 802.11 n. It has in it 1.2 GHz Intel Pentium U5400 and ULV processor.

The keyboard is not a typical VAIO keyboard but has well-spaced keys with a lot of space in between. Beyond the keyboard are two little buttons for VAIO (for Sony’s Media Gallery applications) and Assist (for troubleshooting, recovery and diagnostic tools). The laptop has a responsive touchpad but requires the vertical scrolling region to operate while the mouse buttons are angled comfortably located on the lowest edge of the laptop.

The display of the screen is smooth enough to make videos look clear and the screen has a measure of 13.3 inches diagonally with a resolution of 1,366×768 pixels. Apart from that the laptop has three USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, the standard VGA video port and no eSATA port. Along with that, the VPC-Y218FX has a 34 mm ExpressCard slot, an SD card slot and a Memory Stick.

The Sony VAIO Y Series VPC-Y218FX has a fragile build up and is quite slow in performance. It has the Intel Pentium U5400, dual core ULV CPU with the clock speed being 1.2 GHz. However, you will not find the advanced features of Intel Core i3/i5 chips like Turbo Boost and Hyper-Threading in it.

Performance

It does not come as a surprise that the Sony VAIO VPC-Y218FX lagged the same priced Core i3 instilled laptops in the laboratory tests. The VAIO VPC-Y218FX did not perform well in multitasking tests while other laptops using the Core i3 processor, such as the Asus U35Tc-A1 performed extremely better in it. Both in the laboratory test from CNET and the anecdotal testing, the VAIO VPC Y218FX showed slow results.

The ULV chip is a great advantage in any laptop; it is one of the greatest benefits to have an enhanced battery life through an energy efficient way but the Sony VAIO Y Series Y218FX laptop has failed to create any difference between it and other Core i3 based laptops. In the battery drain video play backing test, the battery lasted for 4 hours and 9 minutes which isn’t very bad for a battery but it is degrading with such a processor.