By Adli Yashir

IF YOU are in the business of image and style, this should be your choice with its dark grey matte exterior and brushed aluminium interior.

For the road warrior, this notebook has enough travel-friendly features.

It is made of a tough yet lightweight carbon body. In fact, at 1.5kg, this Sony Vaio is the lightest in this round-up.

It also shines in speed and stamina. At the heart of this notebook is a top-end Intel Core2 Duo processor with 2.53GHz and 2GB RAM.

This is more than enough computing muscle to run the usual office applications like Word and PowerPoint. Its 13.1-inch wide screen display is small but has just enough real estate for spreadsheets. Watching the occasional DVD movie on it won't be a pain either.

The Speed versus Stamina toggle button is a great feature - but choose one at the expense of the other.

For example, when set to Stamina, the notebook scores 966 points on the 3DMark 06 benchtest. But with the button on Speed, the score jumps to 2,272 points.

Battery life is good. It lasts 169 minutes, enough to play a super long movie like Gladiator. Windows Experience Index processor performance rates the notebook at 5.4.

With its compact size, this Vaio had to sacrifice some connectivity features.

You get all the must-haves like wired and wireless LAN, but only two USB ports. But you do get a Firewire port and a high-definition multimedia interface port.

This article was first published in Digital Life, The Straits Times on Oct 15, 2008.