Customer Reviews

Sony VAIO PCG-GRZ630 Laptop (2.40-GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB Hard Drive)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(19)

 

 

I have had my Sony GRZ630 for about 1 month now. I am more and more pleased and impressed with it every day. This laptop's power and speed is certainly comparable to most of today's desktops.
I was debating between a Dell Laptop and a Sony Vaio. I wanted desktop performance since portability is not that big of an issue for me. This laptop weighs in at 7.5 lbs not including the large power adapter. I think the total weight with all my accessories (power adapter, trackball mouse, portable surge portector, and wireless pc card) and the laptop combined is about 10 lbs. Yes, that's pretty heavy to carry around on foot. BUT I don't mind carrying the weight from my house to my car, from my car to work. I do carry my laptop to work everyday. The weight has yet to bother me. I would not recommend this laptop for people who go to work on foot. However, if you commute to work via a car, carrying this for 20 feet at a time is certainly not bad at all.
The little touches that Sony added for the laptop make this machine that much more superior than others. I compared the GRZ630 to my friend's Dell.
1. Sony has added flaps on the PCMCIA slots. When no cards are inserted, the flap protects the ports. Dell left the PCMCIA slots wide open.
2. Sony has a cover for the monitor and parallel ports while Dell again left those ports wide open for dust and what have you.
3. This laptop has 3 USB ports instead of the normal 2 USB ports for most laptops.
4. Memory stick and iLink abilities are awesome. If you have a Sony digital camera, you will fall in love with the memory slot on the laptop. Not only can you transfer your photos from your camera to laptop quickly without wires, you can also use your existing memory sticks as extra storage.
5. the pegs to raise the laptop for better cooling. not many laptops include this much needed feature.
This machine's processing speed and included memeory more than serves the needs of having multiple resource hungry applications opened at once. I am a web designer. I can have my Photoshop, Flash MX, Dreamweaver, FTP manager, messengers, and outlook express all opened at once without any decrease in performance. Now that is power! The 32 mb video card is great. I often hook up my 19 inch Trinitron monitor to the laptop for duel monitor usage. I can display both screens at 1024 by 768 at 32 bit color at the same time without any problems what so ever.
In short, if you are looking for a desktop replacement, this is the laptop for you. At 7.5 lbs, it is not truly mobile, but it is portable. But hey, this one has the DVD/CD-Burner combo drive, P-4 2.4 ghz processor, 512 mb of ram, 32 mb radeon video card and a 15 inch screen. I doubt you can find this spec in any laptop weighing under 4.7 lbs (which qualifies as mobile in my view) at this price.

The only complaint I have for the laptop is that the USB ports are 1.1 instead of 2.0. But the firewire port makes up for the lack of 2.0 USB ports.

I've had CPU cooling fan problems (it doesnot work) the unit becomes so hot you can probably prepare your Omelette on it. I spent lot of hours on call for service. Also I had DVDROM/CDRW Drive Problems, Keyboard Problems, Video Display Card Problems. I asked for unit replacement and they wont do it. They will change all the parts but they will not replace it. I would NOT recommend Sony Laptops to anyone. Their Customer Support is not at all Good .. Please do not get deceived by the looks or features or Software they offer. I would recommend IBM or Dell for Professional, Business or even Personal Use atleast you will have peace of mind and I am using IBM since last 4 Yrs and I havenot seen any problem and it never crashes .. so much for all the Money we Spend on this Unit is not Worth.

This is not the computer you think it is! It's a little demon, wrapped up in silver grey plastic with a friendly logo.

Really, I should have read the amazon reviews BEFORE I bought this machine. I was blinded by my excitement of having my first laptop - a SONY, at that! I was moving on up in the world. Unfortunately, I wish I could've not moved at all. It has been nothing but horrible since day two. Day two? Yes, day one, it was perfect, like a child in its mother's eyes, it could do no wrong. Then, on day two, it overheated. The LCD hinge became loose. The IEEE 1394 port shorted out. Things just went wrong.

I had the latter of the two issues fixed, but there was still the issue with overheating. No matter what I did, whenever I started to play a game (Unreal, Quake, etc), it would go black and die on me. I tried everything short of holding a bag of frozen vegetables with a towel underneath it to get it to let me play my games. After all, that's what I'd gotten it for! But eventually I found that even if I wasn't trying to play a game - just doing some work online, if I left the computer on for more than ten minutes on my desk, it would overheat and crap out. That was more than not good. Finally, after a few months, I broke down and purchased a cooling tray with dual fans, and that did the job. It let me run my computer for ages at a time without shutting down to cool off. It does drain battery power, though, but it's a trade off. That brings me to my next issue...

The battery life on this thing is for the CRAP. On max battery power, I get an hour, MAYBE. It could be just that my system is running so hot even on the cooling profile it's taking up power, but it could just be that it's made of crap. I haven't figured out which! On normal activity, this battery will last possibly half an hour, if you're lucky. I suggest either buying a better battery, or not buying this computer.

About a week AFTER my warrantee expired, I came upon an unfixable problem. If this is the sole reason you make your decision, it will be justifiable. This is the reason I do not want my computer anymore. The socket in which you plug the AC adapter into the computer has a short in it. At first, I thought it was my AC adapter, so I went off the edge and spend $60 on THAT. But it didn't solve the problem. I took it to two different computer repair shops and they both told me that the problem was of the motherboard malfunctioning type and that they wouldn't dare try to fix it, lest they make it not boot up AT ALL. No computer shop would touch this thing with a fifty foot pole. (PS: They said most sony models will have this problem eventually, so stick with sony stereos and DVD players, NOT computers!) I couldn't even send it back to Sony for a refund or repair!

And yes, it's HEAVY. But I should have known about that. With all the accessories it takes to cool and supplement this computer, it just gained about five pounds. That is not cool. It's also loud, no matter what you do. I didn't really mind the noise because it was always drowned out by the sound of my four desktops, which always sound like they could fly off at any given moment. But in class, this is a miserable laptop to have.

As sad as it is, my pride and joy was actually a POS. I can't stand to look at it anymore. I'm gonna scrap it on e-bay for parts or something, because as a computer, it's worth little more than the plastic bubble wrap it came with.

I bought a sony PCG-GRZ630 one and a half year ago, so did one of my friends. We were attracted by its lower price, large memory and large screen ..., and so on. Half a year later I met the first problem, the integrated Lan card didn't work properly. It was automatically disconnected occasionaly for unknown reasons. One year later, just after the gurantee expires, my friend's GRZ630 failed to power on, no matter how hard we try!! Just a few days ago, I had the same problem with mine. It was terrible! Fortunately, I got it powered on again after exchanging the position of the memory sticks. Anyway, it is the worst experience with this laptop. Just a nightmare!!

Suggestion: NEVER buy a sony laptop any more!!!

I bought a Sony VAIO PCG-GRZ630 at 2003. I was very happy with this machine until about a year later when it shutdown after running for 30 minutes because overheating. After finding out Sony's support/service were not helpful at all, I tuned to the Internet. After searching the web I found that not only this model, many other models of Sony VAIO laptops have the overheating problem. It actually is a hardware problem. The complaining is from all over the world, but Sony did nothing about it.

I had believed SONY brand. Now, SONY is officially in my "un-trusted brand" list.

I purchased this laptop in April 2003 from circuit city. The laptop was new at the time and not many reviews, good or bad, were out yet. It seemed affordable but it has been an absolutely terrible computing experience. There is no reliability in this machine. Whether or not the device is designed to overheat in less than 15 minutes use, I don't know, but this fact makes it impossible to handle as a "laptop". The fan constantly runs making it too loud to use in any quiet working situation. The system frequently shuts itself down due to the overheating, and if you don't have a backup hard drive, you will lose lots of work very fast. The processor can't even handle Microsoft Word.

After all this, the Sony technical help is the worst I've encountered. The service is slow; the techies don't know anything about the machine. "I don't know why's or how's, I can only give you options". My options were to send it back, and get it fixed, or eat the cost and buy a new laptop.

After the "fix" it still overheats, the fan is still loud, the cpu is always cranking something and it turns every application into a memory hog. If you use this laptop for anything from word processing to internet gamming, it will fail. But hey! It's not too heavy; maybe you can use it in the long toss...

We have a house full of Sony products - computers, monitors, TVs, DVDs, even an original Walkman that still works. I never thought twice about buying Sony notebooks, a PCG-GRZ610 for my wife the author, and a PCG-GRZ630 for my son going off to college. Now a little more than a year later both are having serious problems overheating. They shut down without warning after 30 - 60 minutes of work. Won't burn a CD without shutting down. It didn't take much time in the Amazon reviews to find out that MANY Sony users are having the same problems. Search for "Sony shutdown problem" in Google and see for yourself.

Sony's support is terrible. Their phone rings in India. I'm OK with that, but the staff reads prepared text from their monitors and avoids all questions about overheating. Standard reply: "Reinstall the factory software." Out-of-warranty phone "support" costs $20.

Save yourself some frustration. Buy a Dell, Compaq, or Toshiba notebook untill you can verify that Sony has resolved this problem.

Do not buy this laptop, unless
1) it is always snowing in your house,
2) you like to send it in every 3 months for service,
3)Sony is paying you to use it,
4) You need it for decoration,
5) You have no idea what a computer and since your TV is sony you thought it might look nice having the same brand on everyting.

I bought this laptop and it stared overheating and shutting down within 3 months, I finally returned it to the U.S. but Sears changed they're policy and even though I had a 2 year estended warranty, they made me send it to Sony who replaced the motherboard CPU and heatsink, (Costs over $600, glad I had the extended plan) but they never fixed or replaced the DVD/CD-RW drive, so it still scratches disks and doesn't always work.
Now after having it back for 2 months it just overheated and shut off in the middle of a video. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Needless to say I'll be returning it again.
WHATEVER YOU DO DON'T DON'T DONT'T BUY A SONY LAPTOP.

This laptop has it all, my only complain centers in overheating, after 5 minutes or less of full CPU usage, like full window videos or data processing it shuts itself down due to overheating, I read similar problems with this 2.4GHZ Vaios on the net and seems like a recurrent problem. On second place here in Peru you don't get any warranty from Sony Peru (and it really sucks) now I have to take it to the states to claim for warranty, besides this BIG problem everything else on the product it's ok.

Everything electronic in my life is Sony, so why not my laptop too. I could use the built-in memory stick port and the interconnectivity to the of my Sony world. I want to like this notebook, but it is tough.

Is it loud - yes! But no louder that the desktop it seeks to replace. The worse part is it is loud and will still overheat. This is not an Pent-M and will get exceptionally hot. So hot in my case that it just shuts off. This only happens in gaming (like Quake3) - I've never had a problem with Photoshop or Premier or an other application shutting the machine down.

Apparently, you have a choice on cooling - performance or quiet. Quiet is really a poor word choice. Performance means your machine will [turn]up the fan to 100% and continue to put full power to the CPU - even to the point of system collapse. Quiet will also crack the fan, but will also throttle down the CPU to keep the machine from crashing. That's a horrible choice to make. If you bought a 2.4Ghz you want to be able to use 2.4Ghz.

...They are DVD sellers, not computer experts. You're getting DVD player level of support with any Sony product. If you are not extremely enamored with Sony (like me), lack the technical know-how to solve most problems yourself, or are relying totally on Sony to save the day then you're asking for trouble. My suggestion - buy the 2 or 3 year service contract that the store sells ....

My biggest regret of buying this machine is the battery life. I am lucky to get an hour out of thing - especially if I am watching a DVD. At [a price] for a second battery it is tough to justify buying another.