Sony designed the Vaio VGN-CR31S/W as portable multimedia notebook for young people of the urban lifestyle and Web-2.0 generation. Design and look shall deliberately stand out of the crowd. However, our test sample in 'Pure White' did not attract attention by striking colours. This 33.5 cm x 24.9 cm x 2.1 to 3.8 cm notebook actually looks rather elegant than eccentric with its pearly white sparkling lid. Also the weight of about 2.5 kg is unspectacular.

The VGN-CR31S/W appears to be solid regarding materials, surfaces, and workmanship. Also the inside looks due to rounded corners and chrome frames elegant and modern. Furthermore, it seems that the finish of the lid is more resistant against scratches than the silver bottom side. However, fingerprint and signs of use are as usual omnipresent on glossy designs. However, the many stickers on the palm rest area are really unattractive. These disfigure the neat look of the Vaio.

Self-closing hinges should securely keep the VGN-CR31S/W closed. To our opinion they should be tighter. So, take care if you transport your Vaio. The same is true for the outside of the lid, because the picture on the powered screen even changes, if only a little force is applied to the back side. Everything else is typical Sony: The battery wobbles and the display frame creaks (a fact which we already noticed during the review of the VGN-CR21S). Nice feature: Changing to energy saving mode is indicated by a blue blinking LED at the front edge of the base unit.

Regarding interface equipment the Sony Vaio VGN-CR31S/w provides the commonly used ones, e.g., three fast USB-2.0 ports, the usual headphones and microphone jacks, a FireWire and an S-Video-out port. The Sony CR31S/W also comes with an ExpressCard/34 slot and, so, supports modern PC expansion cards. Furthermore, it is equipped with a memory stick and an SD card slot. The built-in web cam with a resolution of 1.3 mega pixel suffices instant messaging services and video chats.

However, the Sony Vaio VGN CR31S/W does not offer all of today's standard connectivity regarding connection of external screens and data communication. While fast Bluetooth 2.0+EDR enables data transfers with mobile phones, rapid Internet access via HSDPA, fast 300 MBit WLAN (draft-n) and high-speed Gigabit-LAN are missing. Another disadvantage is that a high-quality interface for connecting an external flat screen, e.g., DVI or HDMI (High Definition Multimeida Interface), is also missing.

Also regarding accessories the Sony Vaio VGN-CR31S/W cannot keep up with many other competitors. Optical media for system recorvery are missing. the same is true for driver CD/DVDs or adapters for the modem. Sony shifts the responsibility of creating recovery media on to the user. Furthermore, the pre-installed system is overloaded by many preinstalled demo, trial and advertisement software and software by Google, the market-leading data collector. Of course such a bloated system needs more time to boot and the performance is clearly lower than of a slim system. If you want to get a clean system you need install it yourself.

Nevertheless, the Sony Vaio VGN-CR31S/W convinces in the subjective rating. Directly compared to our reference screen, the 20 inch MVA LCD Viewsonic VP2030b, the colours appear to be brilliant and portraits look rather natural. Nevertheless, also this Vaio follows the current trend to a too cold colour representation, i.e., the pictures have a slightly blue tint. Also regarding horizontal and vertical viewing angles it is not better than other TFT LCDs (Thin Film Transistor Liquid Crystal Display). Outside the ideal area of operation you'll quickly face a clear loss of contrast. Therewith, the viewing angles of this display are rather narrow.

The built-in mass storage device of the Sony Vaio VGN-CR31S/W is an SATA-II hard disk with a capacity of 160 GB, a MK1637GSX by Toshiba. It is equipped with 8 MB cache, which are standard in this category, and runs at a revolution speed of 5400 rpm. The average transfer rate of 36.5 MB/s, measured by HDTune, was lower than we expected. This gives a ranking in the lower third of current Penryn notebooks. The optical drive, a DVRKD08 by Pioneer, should be able to burn DVD-RAMs in 5x.

Because of being equipped with a Mobility Radean X2300, the Sony Vaio VGN-CR31S/W is definitely not ready for ambitious gaming. It only achieves about 29 frames per second with 'Doom3' in a resolution of 1024x768, with 'ultra' details, and deactivated anti-aliasing, and deactivated anisotropic filtering (0x AA, Ox AF). It is possible to spent you breaks with playing older non-demanding games. However, you should not consider running 'Crysis' or 'World in Confict' with higher resolution than 800x600 or more than lowest quality.

System Noise

During measuring the noise level of our Sony Vaio VGN-CR31S/W we partly recognized  a high-frequency noise. However, this noise was only audible in idle mode and in quiet environments. The Sony Vaio VGN-CR31S/W already reached up to 35.2 dB(A) in idle mode. This is compared to other notebooks of this category  at best average. The Sony Vaio VGN-CR31S/W performs better in this aspect with moderate load: We measure only a noise level of up to 35.2 dB(A) under moderate load. Under full load we measure a maximum noise level of 37.5 dB(A).

Temperature

The Sony Vaio VGN-CR31S/W convinces regarding temperature emissions.This 14.1 inch notebook proves to be a user-friendly notebook in this aspect. The average temperature at the top side of this design notebook is 32.3°C. The maximum temperature of 35.1°C is also alright. The same is true for the bottom side. The average temperature is nearly 35°C there. The absolut maximum measured is 37.8°C. To summarize, this is very good.

Many thanks to Easynotebooks.de, who kindly provided us with the reviewed notebook. You can configure and also buy this notebook here.