Sony VAIO Y Series 11.6-inch Notebook Review – AMD E-350 APU

Layout, Storage and Battery

The Sony VAIO Y series is known for ultra sleek and slim notebooks and the VPCYB14KX/S was no exception to that. This little 11.6-inch notebook weighs in at 1.47kg or 3.23 lbs, which makes it one of the lightest notebooks to ever be reviewed here on Legit Reviews. It looks like a netbook, but since this notebook uses the AMD Fusion E-350 ‘Zacate’ APU it is going to be hands down faster than any netbook.

When we started to take pictures of the Sony VAIO we noticed that the display doesn’t rotate back that far due to the sunken hinge design, but it should go far enough back for most users.

On the left side of the Sony VAIO we see the the
Power (DC) Input in the hinge, VGA output, HDMI port, CPU cooler exhaust vent and a
single USB 2.0 header. The Sony VAIO Y Series notebook cooling fan is nearly silent at an idle, but if you start putting the notebook under a moderate to heavy CPU workload the fan kicks in to keep the AMD E-350 APU temperatures down. The fan speed ramps up and down rather smoothly, but when the system is cranking hard you can certainly hear the fan a few feet away. This is a a bad situation that you get with many smaller notebooks as you can’t put a larger heatsink or fan inside to improve the cooling issue by going bigger.

On the right side of the power button in the hinge, a Gigabit RJ45 LAN Port, the Security Port that
allows the laptop to be secured to a fixed object with a 2mm metal
cable,two USB 2.0 Ports, a
microphone-in jack and a headphone-out jack.

The front of the Sony VAIO has the 4-in-1 card reader (SD/MS/MS
Pro/MMC) off to the left side, which appears to be a typical location these days. On the right hand side you’ll find a slider style switch to enable or disable the Wireless LAN along with battery and hard drive activity lights. Take note that this notebook does not have an optical drive and this is fairly common when dealing with notebooks that are under 12″ in screen size. If you need to use CD’s or DVD’s then you’ll need to purchase an external optical drive in order to use them. This notebook is all about being portable, so you have to give up the optical drive!

The bottom of the Sony VAIO notebook features smooth plastic that raises up in the back in order for a larger battery to fit. On bottom of the notebook is pretty good sized cover that is held down by three #1 Philips head screws. If you remove this cover you can gain access to the DDR3 memory slots, storage drive and the 802.11n WiFi card.

The Sony VAIO notebook came with 3GB of DDR3 memory shipped in a 1GB + 2GB configuration and both modules were made by different brands and were different colored. The 802.11 b/g/n wireless card is located just to the right of the memory and can be easily access and replaced if the need should ever arise. This notebook has the Atheros AR9285 PCI Express wireless card inside, which you an read more about here if you are interested. The hard drive used is the Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B 320GB 2.5″ SATA notebook hard drive. This particular hard drive has part number HTS545032B9SA00.

The battery that comes with the Sony VAIO is a four cell battery that is rated at 3500mAh, 38Wh. Sony estimates that the battery will last up to six hours with standard settings, whatever that means. Our test results using Battery Eater Pro with standard test results showed the notebook latest 2.5 hours. When we used the notebook for web surfing and e-mails with WiFi on in balanced mode we were able to hit four hours, which is pretty good for a system like this.