Customer Reviews

Sony VAIO FXA53 Laptop (1.3 GHz Athlon XP1500+, 256 MB SDRAM, 30 GB hard drive)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

This notebook is out of date and is way out classed by rivals in the same price range.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.

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.

This is the worst computer I have ever had! Had problems from the start! Would constantly over-heat with very little use. Sound never worked properly, very choppy. On month 13, the screen died out. Customer care was a joke! They wanted me to pay to ship it to Kentucky and then pay for them to diagnose the problem and THEN pay for them to fix the problem and pay to ship it back to me. I was told a replacement screen would run upwards of $600. It's been sitting useless since. I will NEVER buy a sony product ever again and strongly warn against buying this notebook.

I've had this laptop for 3 years now. I paid about $1400 for it. It performs really great. It outperforms my friend's Dell Inspiron 1.6GHz Pentium 4 (same RAM) everytime we run benchmarking software on both computers (and he paid $2300 for his Dell!). Even by looking at it, you can see the same exact programs open much faster on mine, even when both of us close all the crap programs running in the background.
This computer also runs very quite - since the processor is 1.3Ghz it needs smaller (quiter) fans.
ABOUT THE HEAT:
Yes the AMD Athlon 1.3Ghz does run hotter than a 1.3Ghz Pentium 4 BUT it performs much better. There is a reason why they call it "AMD Athlon XP 1500+" and it really runs that well (even better than my friend's P4 1.6, as I've mentioned above). So if you want to compare it to a Pentium, compare it to a 1.5Ghz Pentium or 1.6Ghz - in both cases the Athlon is better. Also, I've seen people stick pencils and pens under their laptops (to lift them higher and help with cooling - they overheated) running Celerons, even when having the laptop on a flat table - I've never had to do that, even when I have it on my couch or my lap. So, in my opinion, the heat is not really a problem with this laptop.

For all the ports and drives it has (floppy, serial, paralell, VGA, and the usual rest) it is very compact and light. It is way lighter and slimmer than my friend's Dell. The battery used to last me over 3 hours (easy), but now since it's 3 years old it lasts much shorter.
The Display is absolutely awesome - just like all Sony displays.
MY ONLY COMPLAINT:
-more video memory: 8MB is a joke, unless you don't plan on playing any games, exept for some basic ones. Just for comparison, "Counter Strike" ran fine on it, but "Command & Conquer: Generals" won't.

So far this laptop has been good to me and it still performs really really well. I keep it free from viruses and defrag the hard drive ocasionaly, and I am (and many of my friends are) really surprised how well it performs.

If SONY keeps on making these computers this well in the future, my next laptop will definitely be a VAIO!

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.