Rating: 
Summary: Terrific State Of The Art Sony VAIO Notebook PC
Review: When I surrendered my other Sony VAIO notebook to my daughter over the holidays, I mused awhile about my options for a replacement. But since I decided I wanted something both powerful and durable, something that I could use with the battery for an extended period of time without worry, I finally settled on this superb and cost-effective choice offered by Sony, one that is quite compatible to my home computer system, which is also a Sony VAIO system. This laptop is small enough to be light and extremely portable and yet has a relatively large and quite bright screen with terrific color and resolution. It is a rugged and hefty package at nearly 8 pounds, and it delivers a lot of capability with features such as a 1.60 GHz Intel Pentium-M Centrino processor, a 533 MHz system bus, 512 MB DDR SDRAM upgradeable memory, and a 64 MB ATI Radeon IGP 345M graphics chipset. With all this built-in capability, this laptop will more than adequately meet or exceed all of your needs. Sony outfitted the laptop system with a 60 GB EIDE hard disk, and features an internal CD-RW/DVD drive for burning and listening to audio CDs, one that will backup important files and allow you to view a DVD movie. One of the best features is its large 15-inch active-matrix display, which is capable of 1024x768 resolution. It also has an internal V.90 modem for low-speed e-communications and an Ethernet interface to facilitate high-speed connectivity. It also serves your needs by providing both headphone and microphone ports as well as an 86-key keyboard that has an electro-static touch pad, and a built-in pair of stereo speakers with surround-sound imaging. It comes preloaded with an interesting and useful selection of resident software, including Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, Microsoft Money 2003, Microsoft Works 7.0, as well as a number of audio, video and photo utilities. This is a terrific unit at a very reasonable, and one I have already had a lot of fun with in the several months I have owned it. Enjoy!
Rating: 
Summary: Horrid waste of cash.
Review: Would not suggest this laptop, oblivious to the tech specs the laptop has no support for any non-xp OS. Sony plays the role of a Compaq-like scum bag and makes the drivers .exe-install only with the .ini's associated compressed and encrypted. For 2000USD+ I won't play that game. This laptop gets the worst rating because it forces you to use the worse modern day OS (XP-series.) Sony needs to halt their continuing progression towards complete and utter crap. The new 04' laptops, don't even come with recovery CDs, that's right they cut that as well, making the laptop 15cents more profitable for Sony. Instead now because all 04's come with CD burners installed, they require you to make your own Sony-proprietary recovery CDs (9 of them) with CDs you have to buy!!! (I can't think of anything I would rather do right after I finish charging my dead new-from-factory battery then burning CDs for 90minutes) Other complaints are the crappy hinges connecting the lcd to base, and the crappy archaic and obsolete speaker system (Sony makes better sounding headphones from 5ft away.) This is a real pitiful purchase; excluding Trinitron monitors, headphones, and smart-shoot cameras I feel Sony's future is extremely bleak, there other products fail to compete in price, they fail to offer even minimal product support, and they just barley run par to the competition's specs. (03's entry model has wireless lan, 04's doesn't - the only manufacture that hasn't made wlan a barebones requirement) The real kick in the ass is the gizmos no one will ever use on the laptop. Like a phone modem, the memory gate port, or even a smart card slot on an all inclusive 2000USD laptop...
All that waste and all I want to do is run Windows2k OR Linux. As one more side note Intel's flagship chipset - Centrino, fails to support Linux natively as well. The only free solution is using ndiswrapper around the Centrino xp drivers. Hooray for two companies which I'm quickly loosing respect for.
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