Sony Vaio VPCJ21L0E review

It’s smaller than the displays on most of the all-in-one PCs we’ve seen and its low position and wide bezel make it even feel smaller than that of Apple’s 21.5in iMac, which has the same sized display and a more elegant chassis. The VPCJ21L0E is around £150 cheaper than an iMac, but it’s not as powerful. With a 2.3GHz Intel Core i5-2410M mobile processor and 4GB of memory, it achieved an overall score of just 55 in our benchmark test. Its performance is good enough for most desktop users – you’ll easily be able to browse multiple web pages or run photo-editing software – but it’s not an ideal choice for fast results from processor-intensive tasks such as video encoding.

Its graphics performance wasn’t particularly good either. The integrated graphics capabilities of the Core i5 processor aren’t up to serious 3D gaming, although we finally managed to get Dirt 3 running at a decent frame rate of 31fps once we turned all its quality settings down to low and disabled anti-aliasing.

This extremely basic PC has few other features beyond a memory card reader and 3.5mm mic and headphone ports. You’ll probably want to make use of those, as the integrated speaker sounds fuzzy and muffled, with a harsh edge to high notes. If the VPCJ21L0E was £300 cheaper, it’d be a very reasonable buy for a student or bedroom PC, particularly if space was at a premium. However, at this price, you can do much better by buying the powerful and versatile Asus ET2410INTS.