14. A Tour Around The VAIO VGN-AX580G

The back of the Sony is pretty bare: from left to right we see an RJ-45 Ethernet port, RJ-11 modem port, battery access area and power port.

The right side of the Sony features a USB 2.0 port, PC Card slot, Firewire port, two more USB 2.0 ports and a VGA output.

The left side of the Sony has a lock slot, microphone and headphone/line-out mini-jacks (SPDIF is also available through the headphone jack port), ventilation holes and the optical drive. To use the TV tuner, you must remove the optical drive and insert a TV tuner unit (shown above in this photo) which features 5 connectors. Four are the S-Video, composite video, and left and right audio inputs. The fifth is a special connector for coaxial video input for CATV, which works with an adapter cable mounted inside this removable module.

Speakers sit at far left and right on the front of this Sony unit, along with a wireless LAN on/off slider, WLAN LED, SD and Memory Stick Pro slots for memory media, and indicator lights for power on, battery and disk access.