Sony VAIO EA33FD Intel Core i3 14" Notebook Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
2,384 words · ~11 min read
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today we're going to be doing an unboxing of a Sony notebook this is a
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notebook that I picked up for a family member of mine so it is uh gets a
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Linus's Choice uh seal of approval especially at the price that NCIX had it
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at on their Black Friday sale where I work so it has an Intel core I3 370m 4
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gigs of RAM a 500 gig drive it is a 14-inch notebook with a DVD rewriteable
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as well as Windows 7 Home Premium it is also a notebook in case there was any
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confusion about about that and this will be the reintroduction of my unboxing
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knife the one that I lost when I was traveling because I left it on my
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keychain and tried to get on an airplane which was
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stupid don't do that so I have I finally
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have my SPID con knife back went and bought another one and so I have broken
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the seal and I can put that away let's
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find out uh about this notebook cuz to be
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perfectly blunt with you guys I don't know much about it I bought it based on
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one of my co-workers recommendations who said this one's a really good deal it's
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on sale this week grab it cuz I know you need a notebook right now and oh here we
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go so here we have Sony's summary of the specs so it's the I3 uh 370m that's a
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2.4 GHz dual core processor 14-in
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display at 1366 X 768 in terms of
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Graphics we are using the Intel HD graphics which will be just fine for my
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aunt and we have another seal to break so I'm going to pull out the knife again
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and I want to really have a close look at this notebook for you guys because
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uh I want to know what I got myself into
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here what's the model of this one anyway
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this is the Vio EA 33fd I probably
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should have mentioned that before so in terms of packaging we've got
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environmentally friendly cardboard packaging throughout the entire inside
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so there's no foam as far as the I can see and uh let's have a look at what's
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in here based on the weight I would say it's probably the battery and it is so
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we have the battery as well as the adapter very reasonable size adapter not
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too heavy which is nice if you're ever traveling around with your laptop so we
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can go ahead and pull that out then we have the battery itself which has a bit
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of a heft to oh that's a weird shaped battery isn't it look at that I wonder
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how many cells it is uh here we go it is
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a 3500 milliamp hour battery so runs at
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11.1 volts I guess that's all the information we have at the moment let's
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see what we got in terms of documentation we have a cyber coupon of
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20% quick start guide okay and then we
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have the notebook itself oh I found some foam that's okay I forgive them so
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here's the uh the piece that holds the laptop itself in and then we can remove
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the laptop so it's got a bit of a heft to it but you expect that with a 14in
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unit they're not quite what you'd consider a thin and
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light and
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uh h honestly structural rigidity
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doesn't come from nowhere and Sony laptops by and large are pretty well
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built compared to some of the lower cost competitors so that's at least what I
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have come to expect from them so I don't
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necessarily need it to be the lightest thing in the world there we go finally
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got that open
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okay sorry this is taking so long guys
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so there we go I got the foam removed I'm going to go ahead and install the
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battery uh the top is a bit of a fingerprint
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magnet already but well that's yet another thing that I've come to expect
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from pretty much every laptop manufacturer out there no one seems to
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be able to quite figure out a fingerprint fingerprint prooof coating
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so as long as you don't mind wiping it down once in a while it's not that big of a deal unless you're like a total uh
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total neat freak or whatever okay so let's figure out how this goes in aha so
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the battery installation is a little bit different from what I'm used to it
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actually operates on a little hinge here so you just slide the battery in like
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that so it's simpler than I had originally thought now let's see if it
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comes with any charge on the battery whatsoever uh my experience with recent
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notebooks has been that it generally does so we've got a little screen
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protector here on the chicklet keyboard let's get this guy opened up and uh the
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hinge is actually quite nice a lot of the time with laptop hinges you can
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really tell if they're flimsily built but this one seems to have a fair amount
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of resistance to it and it feels quite solid even when you take it right to the
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end ends and give it a little bit of a of a push it doesn't have any locks on
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it so that means that it's going to have to hold itself closed you can see once
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you get close to the end it'll finish it off for you and it holds itself shut
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quite nicely but then when you give it a little bit of force you can open it up
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very easily now in terms of the display
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it looks like we're dealing with a glossy screen here although it's not as
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bad as some of the glossy screens I've seen in terms of reflection so here
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maybe you can kind of get it at sort of a worst case scenario angle you can see
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my hand reflecting off the screen but really it's not that bad even though
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we're sitting in office lighting right now which is pretty much a worst case
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scenario so language selection I do have to set this up properly because it is
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for my aunt so uh okay it'll be configured with English you cannot
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change the language at a later date are you sure you want to continue Okay Okay
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so we've got one touch access to Vare the web and media Gallery so the assist
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button that'll be good for her and then we have the web Button as well as the
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media Gallery button let's have a look at the keyboard itself because that's
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one of the things that really sets uh sets one notebook apart from another for
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me is the overall layout of the keyboard so all of the major keys are where I'd
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expect them it is a bilingual layout so
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you're going to find accent keys and all kinds of characters in pink all over the
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place but they haven't made too many compromises that I'd be too unhappy with
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if you have reasonable sized hands you're going to be able to reach the backspace key quite easily and you can
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also reach the enter key without too much hassle the shift key is slightly
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shortened but it's not in an unreasonable position I've seen
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shortened shift keys that are like way over here and it's just not comfortable
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to type on the right shift key is not shortened and you can reach it quite
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easily as well we've got the sort of
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normal complement of f Keys as well as
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uh we've got British pounds we've got yeah we've got a whole bunch of different stuff here oh cameraman wants
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to show the uh all the different inputs and outputs so here's our power here
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we've got gigabit Lan then we have VGA
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as well as HDMI I like this because you've got kind of the uh the old
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standard and then the new standard both supported by this particular laptop
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we've got an eSATA USB combo Port I love those those are so cool and then we've
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got an Express card slot here moving around to the front of the notebook we
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will find a oh that's right that's a memory stick
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slot then we will find an s slot I'm glad Sony is finally starting to support
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some of those industry standard standards rather than only their own so
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SD is nice we've got a wireless switch I can pretty much guarantee I'm going to
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get a support call from her about that at some point when she accidentally
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turns it to off and then uh here we've got a headphone as well as a microphone
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Jack and then on the other side uh we've
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got three USB 2.0 ports as well as the DVD drive personally I don't need a DVD
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drive for my laptop and I would go for something a little bit thinner a little
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bit lighter in place of that but for a lot of people it is still essential uh
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on the bottom we have
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um H not a whole lot we've got access to
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what appears to be memory upgrade as well as hard drive upgrade but uh that's
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about it and realistically on a modern notebook that's about all you should be
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upgrading anyway oh and there's a Kensington lock here that I missed before but yeah I mean on a on a modern
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notebook you're not going to be like upgrading the CPU and upgrading the graphics so there's no real Point having
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easy easy access to the whole thing now I'm just going to type this name while
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you look away since I don't want everyone to necessarily know the name of
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my aunt she doesn't need a password I I guess that's pretty much all I wanted to
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wanted to say overall the touchpad is quite nice it's one of those textured
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touchpads so this is this part is smooth and the chassis itself oh that's that's
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actually really solid the chassis itself has very little Flex to it I'm just
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going to mash the keyboard a little bit here you know what I I should even
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almost take this off the table because the movement of the table is uh really
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making it look like it has a lot more Flex than it does I'm just going to come right down to the floor and I want you
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guys to have a look at the keyboard and compare this to your keyboard at home
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see how my Knuckles are all going white I'm putting a lot of pressure on this
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and there is no flex whatsoever in the
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keyboard itself so that is how that is what really separates the men from the
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boys when you're talking the overall build quality of a laptop is how much
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the chassis gives when you take it and you try to flex it like this or when you
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try and push down on the keyboard so that's it's not always all about specs
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and all about screen size there's a lot that goes into designing a laptop uh the
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touch pad as I mentioned before is textured so it's one of those ones
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that's not going to get greasy and sticky if you're using it for an
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extended period of time it has a left and right click Button as we PC users
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are accustomed to and uh like I said I think that's pretty much all that I
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wanted to say about it thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Sony VIO
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and I'm going to cheat here uh e33 FD
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and don't forget to subscribe to lonus Tech tips for more Tech videos reviews
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unboxings and pretty much whatever else
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I feel like uploading to my channel as with most new notebooks I
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should probably yeah one more thing guys sorry as with most new notebooks one of
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the first things you pretty much have to do is go through an install a bunch of
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stuff so the first thing that popped up when we got to the desktop was a battery
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health status meter which is kind of useful actually and then I just want to
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show you guys exactly what comes pre-installed so I'll probably remove
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acuweather uh I'll remove arsoft
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whatever those things are I'll remove Evernote anything I don't recognize I
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pretty much remove Google Chrome though that's a good thing to have installed by
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default I don't mind that at all bunch of Intel stuff Java this is all okay
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Office 2010 trial nice to see that comes
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on it gives you at least something to use while you decide what route you want
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to go for Office Norton Internet Security I would probably
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remove a lot of this a lot of this stuff
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I'd probably remove I mean if I had a p PS3 this would be kind of cool I mean
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that's actually that's that's neat and then what else do we have here so we've
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got a bunch more Vios software viare Vio control center I'd probably nuke all of
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that although uh before I do I'll check and see if they're actually useful
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things that she'll use and then I'll make a judgement call from there so thank you for checking out the video I'm
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actually done now sorry guys