Sony Vaio PCG-GRX316MP

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If you believe that bigger is better, the new Pentium 4 Vaio from Sony will impress you. The PCG-GRX316MP has the biggest notebook screen in the business, measuring 16.1in with a native UXGA resolution of 1,600 x 1,200. These are figures you would typically associate with a 19in or 21in CRT monitor.

Backing up the display is a beefy 1.6GHz Mobile Pentium 4 processor and 256MB of DDR memory. There is a vacant memory slot under a large cover on the bottom, which can accept another 256MB module of DDR memory.

This notebook is aimed squarely at the corporate market as a desktop replacement, so it could well end up running memory-intensive applications.

It comes with Windows XP Professional, Norton Antivirus, WinDVD, Adobe Photoshop Elements and Adobe Premiere 6 LE, but no office suite. As this is designed for corporate desktop replacement use, we consider the choice of video rather than office software a poor one. However, it is far superior to nearly all other Mobile P4 systems we have seen.

The huge screen is driven by ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics with 32MB of memory. Our graphics test results were perfectly acceptable with a 3Dmark 2001 score of 2,137, and a Quake III Team Arena frame rate of 32.5fps (frames per second). Hence, there's no reason not to use this notebook for gaming in your idle moments.

The Sysmark 2002 score of 138 is also impressive, although we've seen higher scores from other Mobile Pentium 4 notebooks. However, there was a distinct disparity between internet and office scores, which were 195 and 98 respectively.

Battery life can make or break a notebook, and we were pleased that the lithium-ion battery lasted for two hours nine minutes such as Sony PCGA-BP1N battery, Sony PCGA-BP2NX battery, Sony PCGA-BP2NY battery, Sony PCGA-BP2R battery, Sony PCGA-BP2S battery, Sony PCGA-BP2T battery, Sony PCGA-BP2V battery, Sony PCGA-BP4V battery, Sony PCGA-BP71 battery, Sony VGP-BPS2 battery in our Excel-based test.

That's nowhere near the three hours 34 minutes of the PIII-based Vaio PCG-SRX41P we reviewed last month, but it's the longest we've seen from a Mobile Pentium 4-based notebook and particularly impressive considering the huge screen.

Usability and ergonomics are of prime importance, of course, and the look of the screen and feel of the keyboard are good. If you type heavily the keyboard flexes slightly, but in regular use it's absolutely fine.

Travel and response are perfectly adequate. The touchpad and mouse buttons are up to Sony's usual standard. They are the same as in every other Vaio and, as such, are better than most of the competition. Beneath the mouse buttons there's also a jogdial and internet Back button.

A variety of ports litter the notebook's sides. There are three USB ports in total (one on the left, one on the right and one on the back), as well as a headphone jack, a microphone jack, one iLink/Firewire, Lan, modem, VGA out, TV-out, parallel port and S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface).

The ports are tidily tucked away behind plastic flaps. There are two Type II PC Card slots (which can take a single Type III card) and, inevitably, there's a Memory Stick slot.

Should you feel that's not enough, you can plug in a PCGA-PRGX1 port replicator to add a serial port and two more USB ports, but this will set you back £119 ex VAT.

Rounding off the hardware spec there's a Sony CRX810E combo drive rated at eight-speed DVD-Rom, 16x 10x 24x CD-RW, and a 30GB hard drive.

The PCG-GRX316MP isn't really portable enough for those on the road all the time. It also lacks wireless Lan and infra-red which could be a problem for some users. It is a good desktop replacement notebook, particularly for its large screen and long battery life.