Customer Reviews

Sony VAIO PCG-Z1WA Laptop (1.70 GHz Pentium M (Centrino), 512 MB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD-RW Drive)

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

 

 

Great hardware but daddy sony pushes you around with its choices. It starts with a disk formatted only like they want, overflowing with sony useless utilities. It seems impossible to reconfigure it and if you ask them they tell you to keep quiet that they know better than you what you want. Don't even bother to ask to install win2000 you are so used to and know already, it's impossible, the needed drivers are not available.
The best is that it doesn't come with a recovery CD, if you want it you have to purchase it from sony at 25$

While it's true that the Z1WA does not come with a recovery CD, and that Sony will supply you one for $25, it comes with a utility to create your own set of (9) recovery CDs. Unfortunately, the utility to make them is a little brain-damaged. It's supposed to keep a taskbar icon available until you create a set, but looking at it and cancelling makes it go away. Looking and cancelling is also enough to make it force you to reboot with no way to avoid it (beyond letting the "OK to Reboot" dialog languish in the background). It'd be more convenient, for sure, if Sony just spent the $2 to include a set of recovery CDs, but you don't have to spend $25 if you don't want to.

One of my main complaints so far is that the filesystem as shipped is horribly fragmented, making the computer quite slow. Make sure you defrag as soon as possible. It speeds up the computer tremendously. Again, I'm surprised Sony didn't fix this in the factory.

Another complaint is the keyboard. The keys are quite flat and a little hard to touch-type on. Also, the right shift key is the same size as a regular letter key, making it hard to use. Sony should have made the arrow keys smaller and extended the shift to be a double-wide key as it should be, but that's moot now.

Also, it comes with C: (14GB) and D: (37GB) drives from the factory, which seems silly. I suppose it might make it easier to recover, but I haven't tried that yet. But it'd make more sense to me to have the one hard drive have only one letter so that you had only one chance to run out of drive space, not two.

Also, it does come with a lot of utilities that aren't the most helpful. Norton Internet Security seems like too much of a mother hen. Norton Anti-Virus is a 3-month trial, as is Office. I'm sure there are more of these utilities that are doing nothing more than wasting drive space, but I've only had it for about 12 hours now.

The lid can be a little hard to open, too, especially with one hand. There's no latch, just a spring holding it closed and it's a litte tight. It might loosen up with use, though.

Having ClearType font smoothing on as default would probably have made sense, too, but it wasn't.

Other than these quibbles, though, I'm quite happy with the computer. It's quite light, has a nice high-resolution screen (which others with worse sight might find a detriment), looks sexy (especially after you take off the at least six stickers), and performs well. I'm happy.

Want a sony? Please, please for your own good take the time to read these following links. Thank you. My goal is to protect consumers from the problems that I and others have faced.


http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/5449/?o=0
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?sonymem1

I have had this laptop for over 6 months now, and i still feel its one of the best laptops to date. Most people might think this model is discountinued. But actually sony has repositioned it in the market as B Series, targeting business laptop market.

The Z1 is incredible in terms of looks - the metallic finish, the tappered down front, the latch less screen and the black keyboard all spell beauty.

I really like the brightness in this screen. SVGA+ makes a lot of difference. The colors on this screen are much better than the V505. Z series doesn't have the glossy screens you see in S, K or A series now (which I am not a big fan of). But the brigtness is comparable.

But the Z1 is not just a pretty face. I have tired the V505, S260 and K33 laptops from sony. The Z1 and S1 have the best keyboad feel and the right size too, which is very important for a laptop. The touchpad hasn't given me any problems till date. The touch pad is a lot more smoother than V505 and K33.

The Z1 is not top of the line in performance. But I can comfortably run Visual studio.Net or Adobe Photoshop on this. Perfect for software folks on the run, like me.

ATI 16MB card has more punch than i expected. I had no hiccups running the NFS Underground demo too.

Cons:

The Bluetooth software that came with this laptop was not quite usefull. It could not talk to my Nokia 3650 or my Jabra 250 BT. Dont count on buying a bluetooth mouse either.

You are bound the hit the touch pad while typing and you might endup typing else where. Thats sometimes annoying. But it should be ok once you get a little used to it.

Want to upgrade the memory? It would be a nightmare, if you want to do it yourself. In most laptops its as easy as removing a screw. But not in this one. There is a 15 step procedure in the internet, which includes pealing the keyboard. Good luck!

I still can't figure out what half of the sony softwares are for. Why do i need a media server software on my laptop?


Overall I am very happy with this purchase.

This is one great laptop! It's light and portable but tough! The 1.7GH processor is fast!! 60GB of hard drive is more than what I need! I bought it new 4 years ago and it works great and am learning to appreciate it more with time! Never a problem. Love the wireless feature! Worth every penny! Portable, reliable, easy to use, nice to look at!

This Sony VAIO PCG-Z1WA Notebook PC with Intel Centrino 1.7 GHz, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive, CD-RW & DVD-ROM Combo Drive is a great price. Most Centrino laptops come with a 1.3-1.5 GHz but this is top of the line with 1.7 GHz. Even so most laptops that even come with 1.7 GHz is probably $2,500.00 and up. I looked at a lot of manufactures for notebooks, such as Dell, HP, Toshiba, and more. All of them didn't come with the technology I needed for a good price. But this one stood out. For this price you can even buy some accessories to make it even better. I upgraded the Hard Drive to 80 GB. Now I can really enjoy this laptop and know that this technology will not become old. Also I saw another laptop from Sony which was a 1.5 GHz Centrino processor. It was $1,899.00. It is mostly the same but the processor is lower and the video card is 32 MB. And this one comes with a big 64 MB. If you purchase this laptop I would also recomend a new desktop for the home by Sony. They have the most powerful computers for the best price.

The laptop looks cool, and it is light enough to carry around for a long time. But I am very disappointed after I bought one and tried it. It generates too much heat too quickly compared to similar models from other vendors (e.g., IBM T41). In addition, I am not sure that SONY tested the port replicators thoroughly. The port replicators do not support fast Ethernet connection well. When you connect the replicator to a LCD monitor, you do not get video on the monitor when you play video files using real-player.

I won't not buy any VAIO laptop computers in the future. It sucks!