Customer Reviews

Sony VAIO PCG-FXA47 Notebook (1-GHz Athlon, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive)

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

 

 

If you are serious about buying a laptop and you want quality for a good price, then this is the laptop for you. I find the Sony FXA47 to be an excellent laptop from the start. The Sony software included is handy. I bought the 48-Mo. warranty extension from Circuit City, so I don't feel any need to be concerned. Most importantly, the battery lasts the full three hours as promised in the manual. This is good for travel, even though it is heavy. I find that the included weight saver makes no sense if it only saves you 0.4 lbs. Performance on this laptop was a little slow when I first started using it, but after a few days of use it seems to speed up in performance. The DVD/CD-RW is a bit noisy and makes the laptop shake, so that might not be a convenience for business travelers on planes. Overall, a good laptop, w/a few glitches here and there. Definitely good for home/office users, but travelers might certainly want to look at something else less heavy and w/o a noisy cd player.

Sony VAIOs perform well when they are working right. I have two. But when they are not, watch out, you cannot get any direct support at all. I have visited their web site numerous times to look for troubleshooting support, I have emailed and I have called(but you have to pay!).

Incidentally, I also own two Sony handycams and when I needed product support the same thing happened.

Product support is important and if you can't get good support or any, then that says something about the manufacturers concern for their customers, too.

I think the FXA47 is a great buy. I am currently a college student at Devry University and I'm always useing my sony for programming, english, and many other classes. I have never had a problem with it. I'm even running 2 operated systems and haven't had one glitch after a month. Plus I run my computer constantly and I've gone 3 weeks and it hasn't froze yet. So I would have to say the FXA47 is a great buy.

The Sony VAIO PCG-FXA47 offers a great combination of features, rubber-to-the-road performance and affordability for the home user who wants the freedom of a laptop. The DVD/CD-RW drive drew me in, and the fast processor and generous memory sold me. The 20GB hard drive should be plenty for almost everyone (documents/photos/Quicken), although a user editing digital movies might have to think twice. This laptop comes with 10/100 NIC, so DSL connectivity is a snap. The software shipped with mine was also very useful. Note that it comes with serial & parallel ports as well as 2 USB ports, so connection to your peripherals is also convenient. The price is very good considering all you get. All in all, a good deal!

sony has done a good job with is this relatively low-cost powerfull notebook.

i will not bore you with the pros about this machine since you can find the good things all over but be aware that there are couple of things that sony could improve to make this laptop even better; first is that the user should have the freedom to upgrade the os at any time, i could not upgrade my vaio to winxp pro; second sony should have system boards that support pc133 sdram and ddr-sdram, the fx series only support pc100 dsram so you can't fully experience the power of the athlon with a slow memory bandwidth of a pc100 memory; third the fx series should be equipped with newer video cards, the ati rage is quite old and it only has 8mb sdram at 2x agp, i would strongly recommend at minimum a relatively new video card with 16mb ddr-sdram at 4x agp because the fx/fxa series are supposed to be powerfull machines; fourth, don't expect the battery to last you long since powerfull computers demand a lot of power and because amd cpu's eat up a lot of energy even their newest .18 micron cpu's.

so these are just minor setbacks on sony fxa's, but if you compare these with other companies like hp, compaq, etc, you will find out that these flaws are almost nothing. ...

Most of the Sony Vaio line uses the Conexant-Ambit modem. The FXA47 is no exception. This is a software modem which offloads the modem task to the main CPU. This burns battery power at a furious rate and provides inferior and slow online performance.

My FXA47 disconnects frequently online. It waits for the most inopportune moment to do so. Sony "support" blames my ISP. I get the same experience with a different ISP though. I have no connection problems with any other computer through the same phone lines to either of two ISP's.

If you do a Google search for "conexant-ambit", you will find many complaints about connection speed and disconnect problems, not to mention vague Sony promises for problem correction. New modem drivers are so far are not forthcoming. There is a "registry patch" online listed for the FXA47. I downloaded it and when I ran it, it told me that it was not suited to the FXA47 model! Funny, since it was specifically under the FXA47 support page.

The battery life is advertised as 2-3 hours, depending on use. There is a tiny footnote in the specificaitons which says "estimated". I never get more than 1-3/4 hours. Sony "support" thinks that is good enough. Battery life is one of the most important specifications for a Notebook. This is quite unsatisfactory. I'd be interested to know if the other reviewer who got 3 hours was using an additional battery.

Sony "support" reps advised me to disable the graphics driver when I asked how to eliminate the "phone home" spyware imbedded in the provided configuration. Clearly this was wrong, so I asked to speak with a supervisor. This support staff member hung up on me. The supervisor I finally got through to was helpful though, and the server application was disabled with his help.

This unit has known complaints about battery life, poor modem performance, intermittent lock-ups and the list goes on. Some of these problems are common across the Sony Vaio line, yet newly introduced products repeat the same serious design flaws.

Sony support is poor. Email is responded to by an auto-responder and not followed up. The product has numerous known defects. I don't know which laptop to recommend, but I would advise everyone to stay clear of the Vaio line.

The FXA47 is a sleek machine and when it works, it is wonderful.
I run a number of machines with XP and all perform better than this laptop, especially my Dell laptop.
The FXA47 hangs repeatedly when using standard programs such as the microsoft office family. Frequent crashing makes the computer nearly useless.
This is my second FXA47; the first was replaced due to these same problems to no avail. Beware!

My hard drive for this machine crashed 2 months after my warranty expired; I lost an immense amount of data, and had to send it to Sony's repair center to get the drive replaced.

Sony's repair center took one month to perform the 20-minute task of switching out the hard drive, and held the computer hostage after incorrectly submitting my credit card authorization for payment, twice, and after I called to check on the status of the repair twice. As I write this, I have submitted a THIRD charge authorization, because Sony will not send the laptop back without payment, even though I have been trying to make payment for a month -- I initially authorized this payment the day I called in to set up the repair.

I strongly caution against buying a Sony computer. Before I bought from Sony, I had read another review mentioning the horrible customer services; I wish I had listened.

Terrible terrible support. If you buy I hope it does not go wrong or you are in real trouble. To be honest I will not buy Sony again, waranty is not worth the paper it is written on.

All in all I like my vaio. Given the range of options and the amount of money I had to spend and also considering my needs for a laptop the fxa47 was the correct solution. I must say that the vaio runs Maple 7 (a symbolic math program) rather well. A 1 GHZ processor definately helps for numerical simulations (lots of number crunching). However ever since day one I've had to deal with lots of random anoying computer quirks such as: spontainous crashing from being left on too long, crashing intermintently when running windows media player, and problems with xp and the dvd/cd-rom/cdr. All this within two weeks of owning the laptop. The only reason why I haven't returned it is that it still does what I really need it to do: crunch numbers that is run numerical simmulations. ...