Sony VAIO PCG-FX310 Notebook (900-MHz Celeron, 128 MB RAM, 15 GB hard drive)

Rating:
Summary: Great Deal, Has Everything, but Battery Life
Review: ...I have enjoyed this laptop except for the short battery life. The only flip side to this is that the computer can be recharged within two hours. However, for someone that travels a lot by air this fact is very limiting to how much I can use it. And, I am not going to pay $250 for an extra battery. Sony must think me as being deranged to even consider that. Now that I have vented about the short battery life I shall focus on what the laptop does have: just about everything else. It has all the ports that I need such as two USBs, serial, printer, and your audio and video ports. It has managed to meet most of my business needs. I would buy another Sony.

Rating:
Summary: Great Deal, Has Everything, but Battery Life
Review: ...I have enjoyed this laptop except for the short battery life. The only flip side to this is that the computer can be recharged within two hours. However, for someone that travels a lot by air this fact is very limiting to how much I can use it. And, I am not going to pay $250 for an extra battery. Sony must think me as being deranged to even consider that. Now that I have vented about the short battery life I shall focus on what the laptop does have: just about everything else. It has all the ports that I need such as two USBs, serial, printer, and your audio and video ports. It has managed to meet most of my business needs. I would buy another Sony.

Rating:
Summary: solid system with hidden feature
Review: I bought this laptop because it has a complete set of features including a DVD and CDRW combo drive. On all the sites I looked at, the specs mention 4xRW, but what all of them fail to mention is it also writes 8x for normal writes. Since I use CDR for backups, and only burn full cd's it was a nice surprise. Burning a whole CD of backup files and data only took 14minutes. The size is a bit big for heavy duty travel, but for light travel it is a good size. The only annoying thing about the system is it has windows XP on it, which in my mind is a down grade from win2K. Most of the default settings make the system totally wide open to hacking, viruses and trojans. Although there are new features in XP that have potential productivity enhancements, they are far from critical and really aren't earth shattering.
The system doesn't quite have the battery life of the P3 version, but 30-60 minutes more of computing time per battery doesn't warrant 250 bucks more in my mind.
If one were to put two batteries in it, you would only gain another hour of power, where as a third batter for 250 would get you 2+ hrs. From a financial point of view, getting a third batter is a much better way to go for travelers who compute on the go and take long flights.