I recently picked up a Sony Vaio FS215Z for £764.99 on ebay. Brand new sealed in the box. I've always liked Sony's Vaio laptops because of their speed and reliability, and once again i have not been disappointed.

From upon opening the box you can see the vast array of set up guides and help manuals, perfect for explaining the hardware contained in the laptop its self, but also help in setting up the laptop, wireless networking and other help features and contact telephone numbers.

After removing the manuals and documentation, you can see the laptop, battery and charger are securely stored in the white foam frame to secure them box. This avoids damage and the laptop and accessories moving around in the box. Upon inserting the battery and plugging in the charger and just looking at the laptop its self you can notice the sleek and classic Vaio grey colour with 'Vaio' marked on the front cover. After opening the laptop, you can see the 14.4" XGA Widescreen display with a black trim. You can then see the snow white keyboard which includes the 'FN' functionality. Directly beneath this is the touchpad and left and right click buttons.

After turning the laptop on, i was impressed with the speed of the OS loading. The laptop came with Microsoft Windows XP Home Premium installed. After the laptop had started up, i took a quick browse through the pre installed media suite installed on the laptop. With a vast selection of Sony media products and upgrade links.

I then viewed the hardware installed on the laptop. It had installed a Intel Pentium-M Centrino 740 Processor 1.73GHz and a 512MB DDR SDRAM. This gave me the user quicker computing and allowed me to run more programs with ease. Perfect for multimedia and video and photo editing. However for the RRP price tag of £1,051.97 i would have expected at least a 1GB RAM. Also included with the laptop was the 100GB internal Hard Drive (HDD) which again for the price of the laptop, and what its primary intended use of video editing is for i would have expected a bigger hard drive. Another addition to the photo editing and video editing uses of this laptop, is the NVIDIA GeForce Go 6200 TurboCache graphics card supporting 128MB to give you better detailed graphics and a clearer image. This is also handy for supporting games play.

Finally another great feature of this laptop is the integrated wireless 802.1 11 b/g LAN card so you can either connect wirelessly to your home or work network, or connect to your network via the Ethernet port on the laptop. There is also the Integrated 3 in 1 Card Reader that reads Memory sticks, Memory stick Pro and Memory stick duo compatibility. This laptop also has the compatibility of USB 2.0 for high speed USB connections.

In my opinion i think this laptop is a market leading laptop for multimedia, video editing and photo editing. This laptop has a great starting hard drive space of 100GB which is a good amount to start with, however i recommend either purchasing an External HDD or upgrading your internal hard drive. Combined with its Intel Pentium-M Centrino 740 Processor this makes for fast computing and software running. A perfect laptop for home, work and educational environments.