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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Multimedia Laptop
Review: I am vertically challenged so I wanted a small laptop that I could make easily portable. I, however, also wanted a laptop with a lot of punch and power. This laptop fit the bill and has been an excellent item.
My laptop has been on many trips and has survived and functioned well. It went to the San Francisco area three times (one business trip, one vacation and one service repair--more on that later). The cover does tend to get scratched somewhat easy but is not very noticeable given the color of the shell. I don't like the automatic feature of the screen dimming when you are on battery power but you can change that. I have not had any issues w/ the battery life. I have not, however, had it turned on for long periods of time so some of the other reviews have better details on that.
The built in software has been great and easy to manipulate. I have listed to lots of MP3's and played many DVD's on it at home and during travel. I generally use the laptop for websurfing. The wi-fi capability is good but sometimes a bit slow when you first open it up. It takes a while to notice the connection. Maybe 20 seconds tops. I did use it in San Francisco on free wi-fi networks and found that a real treat.
I did mention I had to have mine repaired and I was very impressed with Sony. They have a good customer service line and it was easy for me to ship the item and to have it returned. The rates were reasonable (I spilled soda on my laptop) and it was returned to me in under 2 weeks and has been great ever since.
I highly recommend this item for the multimedia, internet user who wants a small laptop to travel!
Rating:
Summary: good travel companion with decently powerful features
Review: I used a Sager laptop with best-in-breed features until very recently but it really weighed on (literally too !), ~ 10 pounds with the adapter, etc.Traveling as much as I do, I decided to look for a sub 5 pound laptop with good features and after I looked at a few such laptops in CompUSA, this one seemed not only to be very good-looking but also decently feature-laden though obviously not THE best out there. 512 MB of RAM, a 60 GB hard disk, a CD-RW, USB 2.0, FireWire are all pretty good, if not THE best you can buy. The premium that Sony charges for its Vaios was an initial turn-off but with good mail-in rebate offers at BestBuy and a 250 gift-card, the effective price was more like 1375 for me and that's good enough. Ok - how do I like it so far? Battery life is pretty good. It will actually want to turn off the optical drive when on battery first - you can say yes or no. And, if you are only gonna do document writing and choose NOT to go with the dimmed screen (which is REALLY hard on the eyes) and instead turn up the brightness, it looks like you should get 4.5 hours out of it. Now, with a dimmed screen and a turned off optical drive, you *might* get 5.5 or even 6 hours out of it, but unless you are using it as an expensive iPod equivalent, why would you do that ? anyway, I plan to buy one of those 1.78 pound extended battery packs (NOT from Sony - their double-capacity battery is ridiculously expensive) that should add another 3+ hours, so I'll be happy camper. The keyboard will need a little (an hour of continuous use I think) getting used to. Someone complained about the built-in speakers, but I put the Die-Another-Day DVD in and it sounded ok to me...obviously headphones will sound a LOT better I am sure....the laptop's very light, of course, so i love being able to carry it with 1 hand and its lighter than a big hardcover book, so that's neat. Other than MS-Office and Mozilla, I haven't run any 'demanding' apps, so can't comment too much about performance. Eventually I plan to partition the hard disk and run Win-XP on one partition and Linux on the other, etc. However I have run something similar on an old Vaio PCG-F690 (P3-850 MHz) and things ran very well and I read somewhere that a Centrino 1.4 GHz chip was the equivalent of a P-4 Mobile 2.0 Chip or so, so I am sure heavy duty apps (both Windows and Linux) won't be a problem.... Good luck if you decide to buy this ! btw, if you have an Amex card and you use that to buy this Vaio, Amex will double your warranty on this from 1 year to 2 years, but might depend on the specific Amex card you have. This might be important if you are worried that Sony only has a 1 year warranty and doesn't offer a 2 or 3 year warranty unlike other manufacturers...
Rating: 
Summary: What? A notebook with no paper? What a rip off!
Review: This is a total rip off! I bought this to have a nice notebook. I thought it would be a realy nice one since its like 2000 dollars, and then I get a notebook with no paper! Whats wrong here! Does it have a platinum film on it are is it diamond encrusted? Huh? Why aren't you answering? This computer is crud, I type stuff in, asking reasonable questions and it doesn't answer! Hello? Computer? Mr. Computer PLEASE!
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