Sony VAIO EE3E0E 15.5 inch Laptop (AMD Athlon Dual Core P340 2.2GHz, 3Gb, 320Gb, DVDSM, WLAN, Webcam, Win 7 Home Premium) - Silver Lid & White Inside

While you are certainly paying a bit more for the brand when you buy a Sony, you know that you normally get a pretty decent product. This laptop is no exception. It's incredibly smart looking, solidly built and has a brilliant keyboard and touch pad.

Performance-wise, if like me your needs don't extend beyond internet and Microsoft Office programs, this machine will do the job. It's quick and responsive, and while the AMD processor isn't quite as nippy as Intel's latest offerings, you're probably not going to notice any discernible difference for basic tasks.

For the price ([...] at the time of writing), this laptop is good value. You certainly won't find a better built and more stylish looking machine in this price bracket.

My only beef with the product is the battery life - c. 2 hours - which is pretty average, and the sound quality on the speakers, which is a wee bit on the tinny side. Otherwise very pleased and would definitely recommend.

I am no computer expert, but this laptop works very well for me.

First off, it's good looking - sleek, nice colour, and fairly light. Though I realise it is what it DOES that counts.

The whole set up process was very straightforward and easy. Just attach the power cable, turn it on and follow the on screen instructions. It found and remembered my wireless broadband router very quickly; I simply entered my key, and was on line within 2 or 3 minutes of powering up.

If like me you want to use a separate mouse rather than the pad (which I find awkward), you can plug your mouse in before powering up and the system will recognise it immediately.

I would recommend making the 3 "restore disks" immediately (again, just follow the simple instructions, in the leaflet provided). They take about 20 minutes to make, but it's worth it.

The screen display is very sharp, and big enough.

The installed browser is Google Chrome, though there is nothing to stop you installing something else. This is somewhat different to the IE8 that I have long been used to (but IE9 is almost a clone of it), and it takes a bit of getting used to. But you can easily feel your way into it, and the combination of that and Windows 7 (I am not knowledgable enough to know which provides what capability - I just use the "system") provides some helpful features, including easily getting back to already open programs or windows.

It is easy to add programs such as Windows Live Mail and to pin them to the task bar or add them to the Start menu, for quick and easy opening after turning the laptop on.

The laptop has Office Starter (for word processing and spreadsheets) installed, with the option of adding Office 2011 (at a cost). I have chosen to download the free Open Office, which is a more than adequate package for most purposes and compatible with Word documents that you might import.

The system comes with McAffee anti-virus - but I think you have to pay after a trial period so have uninstalled it. I have always used Avast (the free version), which provides an excellent on-line, real-time scan for viruses. I have also added the free Advanced System Care for routinely cleaning up the system (removing spyware, cleaning up the registry, defragmenting etc).

It also has Skype installed, and a webcam, though I have not yet used either.

The system seems to me to be pretty quick and responsive - but I guess that is a factor of what you are used to and how fast your broadand link is (and doubtless lots of other factors too).

This laptop also has 3 USB ports, which is always very useful - one for a mouse, perhaps one for a printer, leaving the third one for irregular uses such as downloading photos from a camera.

All in all, I am very happy with it, and it seems great value too.

Update: I have now used Skype with the webcam for a video phone call and it worked very well and easily; the software makes it very easy to get started, and the sound from the in-built microphone was apparently fine at the far end. The picture from the Sony webcam was perfectly adequate, though noticeably a little less good than the pictures I received from the distant end.

All my apprehensions about AMD Athlon processor over Intel I3 were baseless. This is a fantastic piece of machine. Well built,fast enough for what ever a person needs to do at home, can handle even more. it is equipped with all necessory input/output ports including very important HDMI and SD card reader. Someone mentioned that he couldn't even play you tube video properly. just to test this machine, I decided to test laptop by loading it's processor with many heavy processes. I played full 1080P@50fps video (shot using panasonic HDC-SD700 )by inserting SD card in card slot and then simultaneously opened 5 separate youtube sessions on internet explorer. They all ran parallely and smoothly without any jerks at all. I must admit, it has managed to beat my expectations. Even the sound quality is pretty decent. laptop doesn't heat up any more than my wife's toshiba i3 laptop C660 which she bought last month. I haven't checked the temperature using any specialised software. I am simply going by how frequently does the fan kicks off. it's frequent but by no means more than toshiba's i3 one.

Only downside is it's screen. It isn't LED, and if you see it from extreme ends, you may find a 'photo negative' type appearance.
UPDATE -1: another annoying thing on the laptop is loads of VIAO softwares which were slowing things down. I removed all of them.

I highly recommend it. it's really fast and beautifully designed.