Jay Keller dot Com

Sony VAIO AW Series Laptop

I bought a Sony VGN-AW290 on March 16, 2009, my new super-laptop. I was hungry for more performance, I think it has everything I want and then some. Also I do photography, this machine with it's 18.4" Adobe RGB screen is superb for that, and it's fast hardware is great for video editing. I'm running 64-bit Vista.

-   Intel T9800 Core Duo, 2.93 GHz, 6MB L2 Cache
-   6 GB RAM
-   2x Intel X-25M 160 GB Solid State Drives
-   Blu-Ray Read/Write
-   18.4" LED-illuminated screen, 16x9 aspect, 1920x1080 (True HD)
-   NVidia GT9600, 512MB ram, HDMI output

I'll use these pages to document information for my own records and to help other Sony AW owners. After over a month I am very happy with this system. So far I have the following issues:

I wish they did the keyboard and the palm-deck a little more ergonomically. The keyboard layout is stupid, I am always hitting the "End" key accidentally when trying to get to the arrow keys. I guess i will get trained eventually. I would have loved a back-lit keyboard like Apple's. The paml-deck is not the most comfortable and the machine has sharp-ish edges and corners which can irritate over time.
This system likes to turn itself on. I am assuming that I will get that figured out eventually, but I haven't devoted any time to it yet, I just shut it down rather than hibernate or sleep, that's the only way I can be sure that it stays off. With the SSD's it boots very quickly so this doesn't bother me too much.

I ordered it with one disk and planned to replace that one with two Solid State Drives (SSD). Below are pictures from the SSD installation.

Here is a nice nylon bag that Briggs & Reilly makes, much nicer than the Sony bag. It's a huge laptop so most bags won't fit it.

Here are some photos of the unit with the back cover off. I'll post more information when I get around to it...