The Sony Vaio NR Series is a midrange laptop with a reasonable price and performance specs. The main highlight of the NR Series is having a widescreen display and still keeping the size very sleek and portable. The NR range comes in different variants Sony VGP AC19V14, VGN-NR32Z/S, VGN-NR32S/S, VGN-NR32M/S and the VGN-NR31J/S with varied processor speed specifications from the 1.46GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core Processor T2310 to the 1.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T5450.The Sony VAIO NR is the latest family of stylish, colorful, consumer friendly notebooks from Sony.You can configure a Sony VGP AC19V13 at SonyStyle.com in a variety of colors or buy a stock configuration from various retailers.The overall first impression that one has when looking at the Sony VGP AC19V12 is that this notebook was designed to look nice yet be affordable. From the range of available colors to the fabric-like textured LCD cover and palm rests the NR is a simple yet striking design. The "granite" silver version looks like metal at a distance but upon closer examination it's clear that the notebook exterior is made of thick plastics.There are good and bad aspects of the NR series' design. Our biggest peeve is the colour -- it has a dull zinc finish with a Sony VGP AC19V11. This gives it a sort of industral appearance, and we're not big fans of it. The colour is offset slightly by the laptop's soft, curved corners, though, which the women in our office seemed to appreciate.The area where the VAIO NR240 stands apart from other budget laptops is the storage. Many budget notebooks have switched up to 160GB hard drives. Sony has elected to use a larger 200GB hard drive providing it with 25% more storage than the average notebook. This is certainly great for those looking to store large amounts of Sony VGP AC19V10.The stylish white case design is very sleek and a departure from the very busy layouts of many PC notebooks these days. This design also includes the choice of peripheral connectors for the system. It features a total of four USB 2.0 ports but uses the smaller ExpressCard/34 slot instead of the larger ExpressCard/54 that allows for the user of most card types. Sony continues the use of just Memory Stick media card readers rather than a more universal card reader design.
The dual core processors that come with the Sony VGP AC19V9 provide more than enough performance for average use, even at the 1.5GHz Core 2 Duo configured in our test unit. We would have liked to see an option for an even faster Core 2 Duo "Santa Rosa" processor for those consumers willing to pay a little more … particularly since the Sony VGP BPS2A Battery doesn’t offer a dedicated graphics option.wPrime is a program that forces the processor to do recursive mathematical calculations, the advantage of this program is that it is multi-threaded and can use both processor cores at once, thereby giving more accurate benchmarking measurements than Super Pi.The 15.4" glossy screen is a WXGA 1280 x 800 beauty with excellent color and contrast. The Sony VGP-AC19V4 fairly bright and even backlighting with eight levels of brightness. Horizontal viewing angles are excellent, making the screen an ideal choice for two or more people to watch a DVD or streaming video.
The keyboard on the Sony VGP BPS2 Battery is perhaps just standard fanfare for Sony notebooks, but it is one of the more unique features of this notebook when you first open it. Unlike most traditional PC notebook keyboards the keys on the NR keyboard look more flat.The touchpad is nice and large with a very usable and responsive surface. The Sony VGP BPS2 Battery are likewise nicely sized, the buttons have a reasonably deep feedback with noisy clicks. Along the top of the keyboard is a dedicated “AV Mode” quicklauch button that in theory lets you activate the media player functions without booting Windows.The NR series has a large, comfortable keyboard. There's no dedicated numerical keypad, but the each key is of a decent size so stray fingers are less likely to hit one by mistake. The laptop also has four USB ports, one of which you may want to dedicate for a USB mouse.