The VA11G falls just short of being the perfect all-in-one PC for any room in your house.

Joel Santo Domingo - PC Magazine

The Sony VAIO VGC-VA11G ($2,200 direct) is a prime example of how to combine a PC and a TV. Despite of a few wrinkles that need to be ironed out, this is one of the more appealing all-in-one Media Center PCs we've seen. With its 20-inch 16:9 widescreen monitor, watching DVDs and widescreen TV content is easy and enjoyable. The VA11G is also a powerful PC.

Once set up, the PC displays and records stutter-free TV programming. With Sony's Click-to-DVD integration and MCE Update Rollup 2 enhancements, you can easily get programming off your Media Center to display on other devices. There's even a utility that will help transfer video, music, and pictures to a Sony PlayStation Portable.

The 20-inch, 16:9 widescreen is amazing for watching DVDs and TV programs and playing the occasional 3D game. Using MCE, we were able to view DVDs formatted for 16:9 screens in their full widescreen glory. Most TV is broadcast in standard 4:3 format, but setting MCE to stretch the picture, filling the screen, is easy. The image will look a bit elongated, but if you can't get used to that, you can view 4:3 pictures with vertical black bars on the sides. To help you get the optimal viewing angle, the screen tilts, but the tilt is unusually hard to adjust. The iMac G5, in contrast, adjusts with one finger.

In the next version, we'd like to see support for HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface), or component video-in, so people with set-top boxes can use the VA11G's display to view HDTV content from satellite or cable TV. HDMI and component video are common on new HDTV (plasma, LCD, DLP, and more) monitors. VA11G also lacks support for CableCard HDTV, but so far not many cable TV operators have adopted the technology. For now, the VA11G doesn't support HDTV, aside from the Windows Media HD WMV9 format that you can view on most Windows computers.

The VA11G's USB, FireWire/i.Link, and cable-TV jacks are better-situated than they were on the previous VAIOs, which had many ports under a hard-to-reach panel on the back of the unit. Now the ports are on the sides, easily accessible, and still barely visible from the front of the case, making the system both usable and spouse-friendly at the same time.

One major annoyance carries over from the previous generations, though: You must use the remote or wireless keyboard/mouse to change channels or raise and lower the volume. The front panel has controls for brightness and for turning off the LCD monitor when all you want to do is listen to music, but nothing for changing the channel or volume. This is a major omission, since just about all TVs have these controls on the front panel or on the top. If Sony fixes this oversight, we think the VA11G could replace the TV in your bedroom or dorm room.

In addition to Media Center Edition 2005 with Update Rollup 2, the VA11G comes loaded with a good amount of software, including Adobe Photoshop Elements, Intuit's Quicken 2005 New User edition, and Microsoft Works 8.0. The preinstalled 60-day trial of Microsoft Office is less useful, as is the short (90-day) subscription to Norton Internet Security.

The VA11G comes with a 3.2-GHz Intel Pentium 4 640 processor and 1GB of SDRAM. In attempts to run BAPCo's SYSmark 2004 SE benchmark tests, we were unable to get a valid score, probably because the preinstalls of Office and Photoshop Elements interfered. We tested the VA11G's capabilities with Photoshop CS2, and the VA11G beat the new Apple iMac G5 2.1 GHz by just a second or two across the board. Both the iMac and VA11G are capable of moderately intense photo editing tasks.

At 1,024-by-786 resolution, the VA11G managed a barely playable 46 frames per second on our Doom 3 test and 33 fps on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. You can play the latest 3D games on the VA11G, just at a lower resolution than on more powerful, more expensive tower PCs.

Though pricier than the Apple iMac ($1,699 direct), the Sony VGC-VA11G has the benefit of a TV tuner and Windows MCE. Both the iMac and the VA11G can feed multimedia content to their pocket-media siblings, the iPod and the PSP, respectively. The Apple-to-iPod transfer is more seamless, but you can move more media (namely your own TV recordings) from the VAIO to the PSP.

Now that the system matches the color scheme of Sony's silver LCD TV panels, only our annoyance with the IR USB adapter and the lack of channel and volume controls on the chassis prevent us from recommending that you chuck the bedroom TV in favor of the all-in-one Sony VAIO VGC-VA11G PC. As a Media Center PC, it's one of the best.