The Viao FE 14inch Laptop: A Good Performer Inside Of A Middling Body

Remember the Sony Viao laptops? They were pretty good overall: good-looking & a good performer. Albeit priced on the higher side of things – like Apple MacBook price tags. Low and behold, the Vaio brand has returned but no longer w/ the Sony name attached to it.

So now that we’re all caught up now, we’re already a few laptops in w/ the new brand. So we’ve been using one of their latest Vaio FE laptops over the course of the past few weeks. This is a fully stacked piece of hardware running Windows 11 Home and we’re ready to talk about our 2 cents of it.

You got an overall plastic shell w/ a decent construction. Not the sturdiest but not the worst. It has an ErgoLift fold-under hinge seen on ASUS laptops. This means that the laptop stands and tilts on the monitor side of the laptop and gives you a better viewing angle, more efficient cooling, & a better typing position. First time experiencing it and loved that part of the hardware.

The Vaio FE has every port you would need.

And speaking of its cooling system, it has vents on the sides, bottom, & rear. You got a full-sized SD card slot, headphone jack, 2 USB 3.1, 1 USB 2.0, 1 USB-C, & Ethernet ports. Then there’s a fingerprint reader on the top left corner of the touchpad and a 2MP webcam w/ a built-in sliding cover. The port selection is nice to have w/o needing a dongle or something to compensate for a missing port/jack. The webcam is what you’d expect from a 2MP quality as I would just use an external one if I needed to.

The keyboard and trackpad combo is just fine. Probably my least favorite keyboard to type on as I’d need to apply a little more pressure to every keystroke to hit. Mostly when hitting the Shift to cap the 1st letter of a new sentence or hitting the spacebar. Similar experience w/ the trackpad as well. Just not as responsive as I’d like it to be. So much so that I preferred to just use a mouse w/ it and leave the trackpad alone entirely. However, the fingerprint reader is pretty good & fast too.

OUR REVIEW UNIT:

11th-gen Intel Core i7 CPU
16GB RAM + 1TB SSD
Windows 11 Home
14.1inch 1080p LCD display
Fingerprint scanner on touchpad
2MP webcam w/ sliding cover
2 speakers w/ THX Spatial Audio support
Headphone jack, full SD card slot, Ethernet, HDMI, 1 USB-C, 1 USB-C, and 2 Thunderbolt ports

The 14inch LCD display on this is just fine. Simply regular stuff w/ flat imagery & no real pop in colors. There is some very noticeable bleeding on the edges of the screen when the Vaio boot screen appears. Which is something I haven’t seen in a while on a recent laptop. I don’t want a top of line visuals but I do want better than this for the $800 model we reviewed.

Now the i7 chipset and 16GB RAM combo can handle most things with ease. Multiple Chrome tabs, hours of video playback, and some light gaming. I use the Polar web app and Canva for light photo editing and for thumbnails. Just don’t expect to do some video editing/color grading on something like DaVinci Resolve smoothly. But that app will bring most machines to a crawl. Outside of that, there was nothing I did to make its fans go loud or start lagging. So performance-wise I would grade this being capable for everyday people.

This ships w/ the latest Windows 11 Home which is a much better Windows experience than the many years prior. At least from my time w/ it. A more minimized UI, new Start screen, new Taskbar w/ Weather support, Android app support, new widgets, and more. Nothing has ever been drastically wrong with Windows but visually it is always uninteresting. Now they’re changing things up a bit to make things quite the opposite. This now makes me cringe a lot less when thinking of a Windows machine.

Vaio was quoted for this laptop to offer around 10 hours of battery life. I unfortunately never got that number. I got somewhat close to it at around 6-8 hours before running to charge it. And this is just having several tabs open on Chrome. I even tried using Internet Explorer for a few days and still came up w/ the same results. Oh, and no fast-charging feature present either. I expected it to do better than my aging 15inch MacBook Pro but got around the same amount of juice via web browsing.

The Vaio FE laptop: powerful on the inside yet but a bit meh on the outside.

So this isn’t glorious, rising from the ashes for the company one would hope for. Now our issues w/ it are mainly its aesthetics as we weren’t a huge fan of this build of this laptop. We got a plastic build w/ not the most solid frame, and edges bleeding out of their LCD display. But for what a laptop is supposed to do in regards to performance + productivity, we got powerful processors that handle everything well, hell of ports, and decent battery life.

And lastly, availability isn’t vast either as this 14inch Viao FE laptop is sold online at Walmart only so you won’t be able to check it out in person at Best Buy or add it to your cart at Amazon either. But for starting at $699 and if Chromebooks aren’t your thing, this can be a choice for some but it would be hard to pick this over the competition. There are better-priced alternatives out in the market like the LG Gram or HP Envy x360 which are both within the similar sub-$1,000 price range.