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Sony VAIOŽ FZ140E/B PC Notebook | |
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| Product Reviews from Amazon.com (Rating System 1 to 5) |
| Review | Rating | Last Updated | Pretty and light machine, but lots of flaws for the premium pricing
The Sony FZ-140, 150, and 160 are nice light machines with a really pretty LCD panel, but lack a number of features that should be included for the premium price and between Vista, Intel, and Sony have a number of buggy features. A star off for the price/performance issue and a star off for the bugs, so 3 stars overall.
This review was written on a FZ150E with a T7300 and a 160 GB hard drive and Vista Home Premium; besides the choice of processor, hard drive, and OS the difference between these three models is very slight. The 140 has a T7100 processor and the 160 a slightly larger but slower drive. Other than that, they all have the same features: 2 GB of RAM, the Intel X3100 graphics card, a DVD-RW drive, and similar inputs, outputs and controls.
The good stuff first. It's a true, light laptop at just over 5 lbs, but despite that the gorgeous 15.4" widescreen LCD is oversized for a laptop this small and shows Sony learned something from making LCD HDTVs. Setup is reasonably brainless, and while Sony did include a bunch of trial software some of it is useful - Spy Sweeper, Norton AntiVirus, and MS Office all are nicely preloaded. Controls are intuitive and the keyboard good, and a few interfaces like Firewire, S-Video out (but not in), and a switch for turning wireless off are nice.
The bad stuff overwhelms this, though. The minor stuff is annoying; trial versions of everything from Sony software to Spiderman 1 and 2 (that you get to buy if you want to watch) that take a while to delete, a touchpad that occasionally floats your mouse around, and restore CDs that you have to make yourself. There aren't parallel, serial, or PCMCIA card ports - Sony isn't alone in dropping them as obsolete - but Sony made a big mistake in not including a HDMI output as they do on the FZ180 and up, and replacing Bluetooth with Sony-approved memory card slots makes no sense. Vista is as clunky as advertised, but that's not Sony's fault, and I'd suspect if this was running XP the battery life would move from lousy to so-so. More major are how this lacks a Blu-Ray drive, how the X3100 simply won't support a number of applications (let alone run them like molasses) given its inability to render some shapes, and how the 1280x800 maximum resolution is great for DVDs but lousy for running spreadsheets or reading smaller fonts. Sony rectified the former two problems on the 180 series along with including an HDMI output, but resolution below 1050 vertical lines (SXGA+ and the widescreen equivalents) is major if you're running business software. All these are things that should have been included at this price.
The lack of included hardware is disappointing, but the deal-killer is the performance. It's hard to tell if it's Sony or Intel, but this would often take 10 minutes to connect to a simple 802.11b WEP network. Certain Java apps ran like utter molasses, to the point where keystrokes would often have to be repeated. And finally, the incompatibility of the X3100 with any number of applications can't be emphasized enough; this is clearly not a high end desktop replacement. (Surprisingly, it wasn't Vista's fault at all; swapping Sony and Intel for different brands but the same OS, processor, and RAM eliminated the problem. Sony's support was entirely unable to troubleshoot the first two issues.)
The 180 and 190 series have more bells and whistles, but in any case it's hard to argue for a substantial premium for what you're getting even if it's a darned pretty machine. It's why this has been returned, and 3 stars overall. | 3 | Today |
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