Customer Reviews

Sony VAIO VGN-A290 17" Laptop (Intel Pentium M Processor 735 (Centrino), 1 GB RAM, 100 GB Hard Drive, DVD+/-RW Double Layer Drive)

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Buyers watch out for private sellers

There are a lot of private sellers trying to rip you off .prices look cheap when you send the money you wont get the product or your money back.

Look for the specific items that scammers try to do:

1. Look at the seller's id they look like some what irrelevant. Example (amazon_cheap)(Sony_Amazon)

2. Look at the sellers rating it says just launched because the sellers like to create many e mails as they can.

3. In the sellers comments they will say like "please contact me before buying. Otherwise I won't send you the item".

4. When you send the e mail to them they will say "we are a small company in Romania or UK or Spain trying to evolve to sell outside the country". They will say send money through western union. When I get the money you will get the notebooks with in 2 business days.

5. They will send detailed sellers address where to send the money western union (Spain). I said "I know the address in Spain can I come and pay to that address" he said "I will do only through online" this is cheater.

When you send money through western union you won't get your money back.

Escrow and Amazon secure payment are the trusted payment.

I got an e mail from a seller he said "I will get transaction only through Amazon secure payment. I thought he was good seller. Next e mail he wrote "tell me your complete address I will forward the address to Amazon" I gave him my address .

With in 1 day I got a e mail from "Amazon secure payment" from address looked like it was from Amazon, but when I clicked on reply the to address said "(something@yahoo.com) it was not a e mail from Amazon in that message it said Amazon wants you to make payment through western union. I wrote the email to Amazon they said we will not allow any one to pay through Amazon these are fake e mails trying to rip peoples money.

Amazon customers,

Please beware! It is really sad that Amazon is unable to police up their own web site and allow some piece of mind and security when making purchases.

I recently attempted to purchase a Sony Vaio A290 through Amazon, and at only $600.00 I knew this had to be too good to be true, and it was.

After I made the purchase I contacted the seller at monetasgold@yahoo.com, who quickly replied and inform me that he was shipping from the UK (not in the United States as was listed) and he had to liquidate his inventory because he was going out of business, the price went up to $650, and to secure the purchase we would have to use a "third party" for the financial transaction.

This is not an isolated case. I emailed 4 other people that was also selling the Vaio A290 on Amazon, and they all had very similar stories.

Amazon needs to do a much better job in protecting their customers. I got lucky because I could see what was happening; however, it is easily understandable how a consumer could get robbed via this process.

Good luck and be watchful, especially if you are purchasing from Amazon because they are providing a perfect cover for people to take advantage of us.

This a DESKTOP REPLACEMENT, no doubt!

For the features, is NOT so heavy...with the added port replicator is a monster laptop, sound is exceptional thru the 12" speaker included in the packet.

The screen is out of the mind...extremely brilliant and nitid..even better than my office Vaio K23, its 17 inches surpasses all expectations... the bundle softwares is ok, even would be better if would bring some more burning applications

PROS: Superbrilliant screen, convenient size, 1 gb Ram and 64 mb ATI video card 9600, quick response, 100 Gb HD, not so heavy, nice port replicator, burn Double Layer DVD, wireless work extremely smooth....

CONS: Port replicator easily detached in a non-totally horizontal surface (lap, etc), my XP crashed two times with Gigapocket appl. (for TV captures)...no big deal

After buying this machine I noticed the Toshiba 17" COSMIO with 100 GB HD, 512 RAm and the TV/Video card inside, no need of port replicator, A comparison would be interesting to find.

I wonder why the Vaio A series did not come with all in there as the GRT models did.

Anyway this in an excellent laptop for home.

My review is of the VGN-A270 model (this means I custom ordered the machine from Sony). Differences from the model here at Amazon: 80 GB 5400 rpm hard drive (faster than A290's 100 GB), 512 MB RAM, 9700 ATI Mobility, and added applications (Adobe Premiere and Elements).

The unit is quiet and cool running. The display clarity and brightness is the best there is. Performance of the Centrino 735 is on par with the Pentium 4 at 2.2 GHz. Burns DVD-Rs nicely, although only at 2X, but compatible with standard DVD players. The video capture is its strong point - captured VHS at 720 x 480 resolution. This provides ample resolution to output to multiple formats, from DVD to QuickTime and various MPEGs while maintaining program detail.

The speakers provided with the docking station are nice sounding, but don't expect floor shaking bass from them. Careful when you unpack the speakers - it is very easy to press in on the cloth in front of the speakers and possibly damage them. Between the docking station and the computer itself there are connections for just about anything you want to connect, although there is only 1 PCMCIA slot. The flash card slot is only for Sony's own, used in their digital cameras.

Burning CDs sometimes fails. I've had to reduce the burn speed to remedy the problem. Takes longer to burn but saves on ruined (thus useless) CDs.

The system plays HDTV 720 x 480 resolution videos quite nicely - even when reading from a CD. However, it does not have the performance for the next higher resolution of HDTV.

Overall, this is a very nice machine for nearly anything you need to do. Only those who are into extreme gaming, working on serious video, or use heavy computing power would require a higher performance machine than this.

May be the laptop has superb features for which i have chosen it for my use.And after paying the money via western union to a newly launched seller amazon(who still uses the Email ID- sls_representant@yahoo.com)-the seller had disappeared without delivering it. So even if you are getting some really good or cheap prices for a laptop just be sure that you will be getting that.

I bought this item from eBay for about $2300. I don't think I can find a better performance for this price. If you are planning to buy an expensive item from eBay, check if seller has sold same item before, and read the feedbacks.

Graphics Performance is outstanding: I was not expecting to be able to play a game like Need for Speed Underground 2. I assure you, the game is running like it is on fire. I increased graphic quality, there is no delay or lacking in the game. You can have all road+car reflections, glows, tints, motion blur, fog, incredibly high world details (even check the store shopwindows). The only problem is when you increase the anti allising a lot, screen goes to dark. Graphics card + Processor + RAM expose a great graphic performance.

MATLAB performance: I am working with MATLAB for my research. Matrix calculations are very fast in MATLAB. I am working on 15000x1000 dimension matrices. Process time for my classification program in this computer is: 2.5 seconds. I ran same program in my other Compaq laptop that has 1.4Ghz Intel Pentium IV Mobile processor (with 512K L2 cache memory) + 768mb RAM. Other laptop's process time was 17.5 seconds (7times slower than A290).

Internet performance: Internet speed is mostly based on your internet provider, however, a high performance computer allows you to surf internet a lot faster. Wireless capability is very efficient (it does not take a matter of time to search and connect to wireless networks).

Windows performance: It takes about 65 seconds to open and appear windows desktop (this can differ according to number of installed programs in your computer).Program windows are popping up without any delay. Windows did not freeze yet, and it seems the computer is good enough to handle memmory usage and allowance for Windows.

Long time performance: After hours of study (or after a Need for Speed game) processor heat increases,which cause a slight decrease in the performance. Its fan good enough to cool down the processor in a small amount of time (after I quit from 2-3 hour game, it takes 2 seconds to lower the fan speed). Even the highest fan speed does not make annoying noise (very quite).

Durability: Definetely a Sony high quality item.

Battery life: It is not good as other computers, because of 17inch screen. However, you almost have 2:30 hours of battery life.

Size: Size is almost optimum for a 17inch laptop. Dell 17inch laptop looks a lot like a dumb next to this Sony. Screen and image quality is also outstanding. Weight is unexpectadly low.

Negatives: There is no Bluetooth (you have to buy an additional USB bluetooth adapter). You can't upgrade the RAM memory randomly. You can only have a total memory of 256mb, 512mb, 1GB or 2GB. You just have 2 slots. You don't have the choice to plug 512mb on one slot and 1GB on the other (LAPTOP will not start if you do that).

Extra features: AV dock amplifier allows you to enjoy the sound with two SONY speakers (extremely pure sound quality but don't expect a lot of bass). AV dock also enables to connect your laptop with TV, DVD player, antenna. You can even connect your DV camera (old cassette camera) and convert the movie to a digital mpeg movie. You can also plug a Sony microdrive (even PRO Duo s) directly into the slot on laptop (that's a faster way of copying files instead of connecting your digital camera).

I definetely recommend this computer to a friend.

This Sony VAIO VGN-A290 Notebook PC is a great desktop replacing laptop. It has an Intel Inside Centrino Processor 1.7GHz. It might be a desktop replacement but you can still take it to the cafe and to the airport in a breeze. 1 GB RAM is very good to have since I do a lot of music and graphic software programs which take up a lot of RAM on the computer. 100GB is enough for me to download thousands of hours of music without making my computer even slow down. The wireless internet on this notebook PC is still vary fast. I usually get 11 Mbps at the airport which is pretty good. I can burn my DVDs on the DVD+/-RW Double Layer Drive easily without any mistakes. I used to have a Toshiba Satellite 1955-S803 notebook PC which costed around $2,500.00 with an Intel Inside Pentium 4 2.49GHz Processor, 512 DDR SDRAM, 60GB Hardrive, WiFi Technology, DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo Drive, Wireless Keyboard that couldn't top this one. I love this machine and you should experience it yourself.

I bought this Vaio on Ebay for $ 2,425 New in Box, unopened. I use it for high-end 3D surfacing, for Photoshop and Premiere, and for Corel Painter. It is excellent. The ATi graphics had to be set to full screen 3D to work properly in 3D, but it beats much higher end notebooks hands down.

I bought an extra Logitech MX1000 wireless Laser mouse with it, for unprecedented precision in my work.

I am loving it.

When buying on Ebay, I always look for the amount of feedback (preferably high) and never under 98.9% positive. For these sort of higher priced items it gives an extra security.

I bought one of these on Ebay when it first came out. My first hard drive lasted about a month. My second one lasted about 2 months. My third hard drive lasted about 2 months also. The computer was always taken very good care of and always covered up when not being used, so I have no idea what went wrong. I will say that Sony customer service repaired it promptly and even after the warranty was expired. It now appears to be working fine. I thought about selling it before another hard drive goes out, but I like this way too much to get rid of it. The picture quality is extraordinary. I'm keeping it until I find something better and I haven't seen it yet.

I think just about everyone who reviewed it has said most of what I wanted to say. She is just a workhorse that has never let me down. I let her down but she has never let me down. I bought her back in 2004 and she is still in excellent shape. I have seen the newer Sony laptops and even though they are faster with blueray and hdmi outputs I just don't want to give up using the port replicator (VGP-PRAV1) that allows me to listen to music or movies in surround using the optical out port. Or watching TV on the laptop using the cable-tv plug. I even like to use the old RCA output jacks to record video or audio to be played elsewhere. It is just easier to deal with than messing around with HDMI and composite/component outputs. If I was to look at another laptop it would probably be the Sony VPCEC390X but w/o that port replicator I just don't see me investing in it.