Unfortunately, when you remove three screws and open the case, you'll see the Sony's Achilles' heel or glaring omission: Intel's bottom-feeder 845GL chipset with integrated graphics, with no AGP slot for possible upgrades. The system stumbles to a poor 3DMark 2001 SE Pro score of 972, and plays Quake III Arena at a slowly-moving-target level of 25 frames per second in High Quality 1,024 by 768 mode.

We've complained long, loud, and often about otherwise well-equipped consumer PCs with chintzy integrated graphics that are too slow to play current games; when such a system is touted for demanding digital video editing and DVD production, we get downright mad. (The new RS220 has a fractionally faster 845GV chipset, but no AGP slot either, so our criticism still applies.)

For the record, the rest of what's under the hood is more appealing, with wide-open access to two memory sockets (one holding a 256MB DIMM, the other empty) and two PCI slots -- a third is blocked by the CRM riser slot and 56Kbps modem. There's room for an additional hard disk beneath the 60GB Maxtor 5,400-rpm drive; two 5.25-inch bays are occupied by a 40X ASUS CD-ROM and the Toshiba SD-R5002 -- a 2/1/12X DVD-RW and 16/10/40X CD-RW combo drive.

Two USB 2.0 ports and one 4-pin IEEE 1394 port are behind a fold-down panel on the front of the case, just below the Vaio logo that serves as a spooky blue glowing power indicator. Around the back are two more USB 2.0 ports and -- a welcome touch -- a 6-pin or powered IEEE 1394 port for digital video peripherals, along with parallel, serial, VGA, Ethernet, PS/2 mouse and keyboard, and audio (microphone, line-in, and headphone) ports.

A Bountiful Bundle

In addition to a pair of compact speakers (no subwoofer), the Vaio comes with the best keyboard we've seen on a Sony desktop in years -- finally abandoning the company's inexplicable notebook-style layout without dedicated cursor-control keys (even though Sony notebooks have them) in favor of a conventional design and firm if plasticky typing feel. Volume up, down, and mute buttons and a sleep/suspend key perch above the top row. It's an improvement that earns cheers, though the cheap mechanical rolling-ball rather than optical mouse gets a boo.

We've earlier mentioned Sony's Click to DVD as a worthy rival -- if not Windows PC vendors' only rival -- to Apple's iDVD; especially if you're using a Sony MiniDV camcorder, its ability to automatically adjust audio and video quality to fit a tape onto a blank DVD-R, with attractive chapter-menu backgrounds, is a great first step into DVD authoring, with custom-chapter-editing and slide-show further steps just a click away.

The Windows XP Home Edition-based Vaio also provides Sony's exemplary digital photo and music management and home-network file-sharing utilities. And we were pleased that, in addition to McAfee.com Security Center, CyberLink PowerDVD, and Quicken 2003 New User Edition, the RS100 came with Corel's WordPerfect Office 2002 suite -- including the CorelCentral and Presentations modules left out of many OEMs' WordPerfect-and-Quattro-Pro-only "Productivity Pack."

Such capability tempted us to classify the RS100 as a capable, general-purpose productivity PC with the convenience of high-capacity DVD-RW backup or storage, plus -- despite its sluggish graphics -- at least the option of occasional or beginner-level dabbling with digital video.

But frankly, that rationalization works better with an $800 price than the new RS220 model's $1,000 tag; the latter system has a 2.53GHz CPU, more memory, and a bigger hard disk, but its lack of decent graphics or an AGP slot disqualifies it from our recommendation. We don't mind vendors' trying to make a profit, but we suspect CPU inflation is skewing the consumer PC market as much as grade inflation skews college scores.

Pros:

• DVD-RW drive and first-class connectivity at a low price
• Good creativity and productivity software bundle

Cons:

• We'd settle for 2.0GHz speed if Sony would supply an AGP slot

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