Rating: 
Summary: Great laptop, but poor battery life
Review: After doing some research on laptops for a few weeks I had decided to purchase a Dell Inspiron 2600. However, I decided to do a little more searching and came across the FXA53 for a very good price. ($1380 before $100 rebate) This laptop only takes about 40 seconds to boot up which is pretty good in my opinion. It runs amazingly quiet and is very cool unlike some laptops that can get very hot, thus making it uncomfortable to have on your lap. I mainly have two gripes with the laptop. I wish it had came with a better video card. Watching dvd's is ok, but in some parts in can become grainy. This laptop would be perfect if it came with an nvidia card. My second gripe is the horrible battery life. I can only watch a dvd for about 1hour and 20 minutes before I get a warning that the battery is very low. Sony charges $250 for an additional battery which I think is outrageous for a battery that can't even last two hours. If you decide to buy this laptop, buy an additional battery off of ebay for around $100. I like this laptop, but I wish Sony would learn how to make better batteries. My next laptop will probably be a Dell, because their batteries last nearly 3 hours and are much cheaper. If you plan to have your laptop plugged in the majority of the time, then this is a good buy, but if you're like me and want to be able to use your laptop on the road then look elsewhere. I don't know how the other review managed to get his battery to last over 2 hours. Well, that's all, hope this review was helpful.
Rating:
Summary: Great laptop, but poor battery life
Review: After doing some research on laptops for a few weeks I had decided to purchase a Dell Inspiron 2600. However, I decided to do a little more searching and came across the FXA53 for a very good price. ($1380 before $100 rebate) This laptop only takes about 40 seconds to boot up which is pretty good in my opinion. It runs amazingly quiet and is very cool unlike some laptops that can get very hot, thus making it uncomfortable to have on your lap. I mainly have two gripes with the laptop. I wish it had came with a better video card. Watching dvd's is ok, but in some parts in can become grainy. This laptop would be perfect if it came with an nvidia card. My second gripe is the horrible battery life. I can only watch a dvd for about 1hour and 20 minutes before I get a warning that the battery is very low. Sony charges $250 for an additional battery which I think is outrageous for a battery that can't even last two hours. If you decide to buy this laptop, buy an additional battery off of ebay for around $100. I like this laptop, but I wish Sony would learn how to make better batteries. My next laptop will probably be a Dell, because their batteries last nearly 3 hours and are much cheaper. If you plan to have your laptop plugged in the majority of the time, then this is a good buy, but if you're like me and want to be able to use your laptop on the road then look elsewhere. I don't know how the other review managed to get his battery to last over 2 hours. Well, that's all, hope this review was helpful.
Rating: 
Summary: worst laptop I've owned
Review: I have had this laptop for about 10 months now. It's very heavy when you add the second battery. I have gone to a rolling laptop case for travel as my shoulder couldn't take the weight.I added third party memory to bring it up to 512MB, I'm on my third module. I think the heat killed the others. Luckily I bought the lifetime warrenty, so it's all been free replacements. I recommend a laptop cooler as it gets very hot. I have been using it to capture minidv from my dvcamcorder. I scan tape and capture unattended. It works flawlessly. For this use I highly recommend this laptop. Overall, I like the computer, only draw backs are weight, and slow performance compared to other laptops I have used in the same class.
Rating:
Summary: good all around laptop, great for digital video capture
Review: I have had this laptop for about 10 months now. It's very heavy when you add the second battery. I have gone to a rolling laptop case for travel as my shoulder couldn't take the weight. I added third party memory to bring it up to 512MB, I'm on my third module. I think the heat killed the others. Luckily I bought the lifetime warrenty, so it's all been free replacements. I recommend a laptop cooler as it gets very hot. I have been using it to capture minidv from my dvcamcorder. I scan tape and capture unattended. It works flawlessly. For this use I highly recommend this laptop. Overall, I like the computer, only draw backs are weight, and slow performance compared to other laptops I have used in the same class.
Rating:
Summary: I used to love my Vaio laptop until she got FRIGID on me!
Review: I'm editing this review because this Vaio has caught the FREEZE bug that so many other Vaio owners have reported.
Of course its out of warranty now, so I'm out of luck. But I can't recommend this or any other VAIO notebook until that freeze bug is fixed!
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I've owned my FXA-53 for less than two weeks. One of the first things I did was test the battery life by watching a DVD movie. After watching the 2 hour and 10 min movie I still had 38 minutes of life showing on the gauge! Not bad! The picture quality was "sufficient", not spectacular but good enough. One thing I did notice was that the internal modem is not the speediest. I can be pretty demanding on a modem, because I produce and test streaming media. If you research around the internet you'll find many complaints about the internal "Conextant Soft56K" modem being rather slow. But I was able to find some posts on initialization strings for the Conextant that can easily be typed into the modem properties window to give it somewhat faster (but still not blazing) connections. The init strings worked and I've had no further problems with this computer. Its lightweight, it runs cool (unlike my previous Winbook XL which wanted to burn its way down to hell right through my lap!) And its been quite reliable even when running several applications at once and dealing with many large open documents. Maybe its a little slower than I expected in copying and pasting huge documents, but at least it didn't choke on any of them. I don't expect my laptop to be as fast and powerful as my desktop computer. I just want it to be reliable and long-lived.
So far the Sony VAIO is sufficiently fast, powerful and reliable. We'll see how long it lasts.
Rating:
Summary: worst laptop I've owned
Review: I've had this notebook computer for just under 2 years and in that time it has been nothing but problems. It constantly locks up and runs much hotter than any other laptop I've ever had. It has crappy speakers,it's sound is intermittent and the restore function does not always work. I've had to reformat the hard drive 9 times since owning it and now the monitor no longer works. Sony charges insane prices for it's repair as well as it's accesories. I've always used it as more of a desktop so hooking it up to an external monitor is an acceptable although irritating solution for the monitor problem. It won't however change the fact that this is a lousy piece of machinery.
Rating:
Summary: Fast, light, well-priced - slow modem.
Review: I've owned my FXA-53 for less than two weeks. One of the first things I did was test the battery life by watching a DVD movie. After watching the 2 hour and 10 min movie I still had 38 minutes of life showing on the gauge! Not bad! The picture quality was "sufficient", not spectacular but good enough. One thing I did notice was that the internal modem is not the speediest. I can be pretty demanding on a modem, because I produce and test streaming media. If you research around the internet you'll find many complaints about the internal "Conextant Soft56K" modem being rather slow. But I was able to find some posts on initialization strings for the Conextant that can easily be typed into the modem properties window to give it somewhat faster (but still not blazing) connections. The init strings worked and I've had no further problems with this computer. Its lightweight, it runs cool (unlike my previous Winbook XL which wanted to burn its way down to hell right through my lap!) And its been quite reliable even when running several applications at once and dealing with many large open documents. Maybe its a little slower than I expected in copying and pasting huge documents, but at least it didn't choke on any of them. I don't expect my laptop to be as fast and powerful as my desktop computer. I just want it to be reliable and long-lived.
So far the Sony VAIO is sufficiently fast, powerful and reliable. We'll see how long it lasts.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Laptop
Review: So far I really love this machine. It has a beautiful display. The software bundle is very good. I would have liked to have MS Word instead of the Word Perfect suite though. I had to send it in for warranty work for the keyboard and got it back in a week. Sony made it easy to keep track of the progress of the repair online. Their support was great. As a long time Apple user I almost bought an iBook but the Sony gave more for the amount of money I could spend such as legacy ports (so I could use my printer) and a floppy drive. Apple's recent ads promote the switch of PC users to Apple. After alot of thought I did the opposite. I just couldn't go with Apple again. I would recommend this machine to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Great Laptop
Review: So far I really love this machine. It has a beautiful display. The software bundle is very good. I would have liked to have MS Word instead of the Word Perfect suite though. I had to send it in for warranty work for the keyboard and got it back in a week. Sony made it easy to keep track of the progress of the repair online. Their support was great. As a long time Apple user I almost bought an iBook but the Sony gave more for the amount of money I could spend such as legacy ports (so I could use my printer) and a floppy drive. Apple's recent ads promote the switch of PC users to Apple. After alot of thought I did the opposite. I just couldn't go with Apple again. I would recommend this machine to anyone.
Rating: 
Summary: Keep looking, over priced and out of date
Review: This notebook is out of date and is way out classed by rivals in the same price range. What I don't like:
SDRAM? Most notebooks in this price range offer DDR-SDRAM. DDR transmits twice the data with each clock, making it much faster. SDRAM has been abandoned. 1.3 GHz Athlons: They run hot and lack SSE-2. SSE-2 is a feature built into current Intel and future AMD CPUs. If you don't have it, software that uses it will run slower. This includes major products like Windows, Adobe, and many games. ATI RAGE MOILITY graphics chipset? Very old news with almost no 3D features. Notebooks that cost 30% less are at least offering the ATI Radeon M6-P or even ATI 7500 chipsets. If this notebook was half the price I could endorse it. At this price it is highway robbery. Either look at Toshiba, HP, Gateway or Dell, or move up the Sony price range into one of their newer P4 based notebooks. I'm sure this left over is about to be discontinued.
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