Sony Vaio Y-series 11.6in review

Sony has produced netbooks before, but we’ve been unimpressed with the cramped keyboards and poor battery life of the company’s previous attempts. Although Sony doesn’t call its new Vaio Y series laptop a netbook, it uses a new AMD E350 Fusion dual core processor which, in our application benchmarks, performs very similarly to Intel’s Atom netbook processors.

Paired with 4GB of RAM the Vaio Y feels very snappy and it’s fast enough for working in a couple of applications simultaneously or basic image editing, but we wouldn’t want to use it for more intensive work such as editing video.

One area where the E350 processor is superior to an Atom is graphics performance. Its on-board graphics chip, which shares system memory, is far quicker at rendering 3D graphics, managing around 12fps in a 3D game. We wouldn’t want to use it for strenuous work in a GPGPU-accelerated program, but it’s also capable of playing 720p high definition video so it’s not without its uses.

One oddity is that even though the Vaio Y has 4GB of RAM, it only comes with the 32-bit version of Windows 7.

One oddity is that even though the Vaio Y has 4GB of RAM, it only comes with the 32-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium. This means that only 3.5GB of RAM is actually available for use. It’s an annoying limitation as the operating system can’t be swapped out for a 64-bit version, or Windows 7 Professional for that matter, when ordering. Users still stuck with older applications that aren’t 64-bit compatible might be pleased though.

Even more oddly the memory can’t be upgraded past 4GB. Although this sounds limiting, the Vaio Y’s AMD processor isn’t designed for demanding applications so it’s more likely you’ll bump into its limitations first rather than a lack of memory.