Vaio VGC-RC204

Sony doesn’t have a great record for releasing new formats – Betamax and UMD are just two examples that technology historians have a tendency to chuckle at. This machine is sold on Sony’s latest attempt at an all-encompassing standard – namely Blu-ray.

Admittedly, Blu-ray isn’t solely a Sony project, and it does have benefits over the competing HD-DVD, specifically capacity. Being able to throw up to 25GB on to each single-layer disc makes this a neat storage solution. Of course, in an ideal world you’d be able to slot such discs into other machines as well.

The rest of the machine boasts fairly common components for any media system, albeit one that uses an odd-looking case – the design has a book-sized hole though the middle of the chassis. Sony has certainly gone to town with the connections. A flap underneath the two optical drives affords access to USB and i.Link (FireWire) ports as well as the multi-card reader, while a door at the bottom of the machine is packed with AV connectors, as well as another pair of USB ports. A bevy of connectors, including access to the integrated TV tuner, can also be found round the back.

Windows Media Center 2005 provides the interface for accessing the capabilities of the machine, with plenty of utilities providing additional support. Sony’s software may be non-standard at times, but it is capable, and it will easily handle most forms of video.

The processor industry doesn’t stand still for long, and the Intel Pentium 940 CPU that powers this system has been eclipsed recently by the Core 2 Duo. This means that this £1,800 machine will take longer at processor intensive tasks than a machine costing a third of that. The same is true of the storage – 600GB isn’t bad, but the RAID configuration pales next to the latest 750GB drives using perpendicular technology.

When you consider there are machines offering terabytes of space for nearly half this price, the areas where Sony has tried to stand out don’t look quite so convincing. Even the 7600GT graphics card seems somewhat out of place at this price. Sony may be at the cutting edge in entertainment, but its PCs have always had problems making such claims, and this system doesn’t buck the trend. The performance is underwhelming, it’s expensive and it’s huge. The only justification for spending this much would be for the Blu-ray drive, but it’s hard to beat external hard drives for the same task, at least until the mass adoption of the HD standard.