Sony VAIO VGN-FS760/W 15.4" Laptop (Intel Pentium M Processor 750, 512 MBRAM, 100 GB Hard Drive, DVD+R Dbl Layer/DVD+/-RW Drive)

by Sony

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 14.3 x 1.4 inches ; 6.3 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 11 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000B5RSMC
• Item model number: VGN-FS760/W
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 23, 2005

Product Description

Includes: lithium-ion battery, AC adapter, Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition with SP2, Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition, Quicken 2005 New User Edition, WinDVD, Works 8.0, Office 2003 60-day trial (Student/Teacher Edition), Roxio DigitalMedia SE, & more. Sony Vaio FS VGN-FS760/W Notebook Computer - This laptop computer combines advanced multimedia features with the tools you need for everyday computing on the road. With the 15.4" widescreen LCD, you can enjoy DVD movies the way they were meant to be seen. Or make your own DVD creations with the built-in DVD writer and included original Sony software. 100GB 4200RPM HDD 512MB of PC3200 DDR2 SDRAM (expandable up to 2GB) NVIDIA GeForce Go 6400 with TurboCache supporting 128MB of memory Double Layer DVD Writer - (write speeds) up to 2.4x Double Layer DVD+R, 8x DVD-R, 8x DVD+R, 4x DVD-RW, 4x DVD+RW, 24x CD-R, & 10x CD-RW Double Layer DVD Writer - (read speeds) up to 8x DVD-ROM & 24x CD-ROM 56k v.90 Data/Fax Modem Built-in Stereo Speakers Ports - 10/100 Ethernet, VGA Out, 3 USB 2.0, 4-pin Firewire, & Printer Built-in Memory Stick(R) Media Slot - supports Memory Stick, Memory Stick(R) PRO, & Memory Stick(R) DUO media 1 PCMCIA Type I/II Card Slot with CardBus support External Color - White

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Machine, January 10, 2006

By 

A. Landrum "web developer" (Greenville, SC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sony VAIO VGN-FS760/W 15.4" Laptop (Intel Pentium M Processor 750, 512 MBRAM, 100 GB Hard Drive, DVD+R Dbl Layer/DVD+/-RW Drive) (Personal Computers)

I always look at the reviews, but I never write one...so here goes.

First of all, I bought this 12/28/05 at best buy for 1099. Great sale.

Pros:

The Screen. It's the reason I bought it. I was sold on the xbrite technology and since I'm a developer and stare at the screen for 10+ hours a day, it was a must (I have a 19" LCD Viewsonic for my desktop, and it looks like the Viewsonic is running about 1/2 power next to the Sony laptop).

The design: I hate to admit it, but I love the design of the computer. It's very slim and lightweight. I do sales for my web company, so when I pull this bad boy out, it looks cool and the screen, like I said, is unbelievable.

Performance: As a developer, I figured I would be upgrading the RAM soon. But I haven't had to. Performance has been great.

Integrated Wireless: Just because I've never had an internal wireless before--it's great and convenient.

Cons (I feel a review isn't a review unless there's a con or two):

Battery - The biggest draw back to this machine, no doubt. It lasts 1:45 at max. However, I did ask a friend who has two toshiba xbrites, and they too last less than 2 hours. So I think it is the xbrite technology and not the machine that causes the poor battery performance. I knew this going in, but I am still disappointed that I have to find a plug if I plan to do any extended mobile work (or watching a DVD. I haven't tested yet, but I bet you can't watch a full movie on this computer without it being plugged in).

Lack of Media Buttons - Like most people, I listen to music while I work. I am disappointed that there are no media buttons to control playback (stop, play, pause, next, previous, volume, etc.). There are two "customizable" buttons that you can program, one of which is volume. That helps--little.

Extra Power Plug - It's $99 (ebay is $60). Extremely expensive to get another one of these for home or on the go, but a necessity (it's a pain to always unplug and packup the plug at work.

Overall: I've been very pleased with this purchase, I knew the battery limitation before buying (from other reviews) so there were no surprises. The battery does however keep it from being a 5.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Decent Enough - but can be better, November 24, 2008

By 

P V S Jagan Mohan (India) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sony VAIO VGN-FS760/W 15.4" Laptop (Intel Pentium M Processor 750, 512 MBRAM, 100 GB Hard Drive, DVD+R Dbl Layer/DVD+/-RW Drive) (Personal Computers)

This was my first Laptop, purchased early in 2006. I still use it today - and after three years of heavy usage, I can say that the laptop performed reliably and overall a decent purchase. The mistake I made was buying it in a big electronics store instead of doing it online which would have saved me a considerable packet of money.

The Processor is a Pentium Mobile 7XX series with about 1.83GHz speed. This was the last of the processors in Notebook before the Dual Core processors came into picture.

The Laptop came with a meagre 512MB of RAM when I purchased it (Which was standard at that time). after about eight months or so, I spent another 80$ upgrading the ram to 2GB and I can say that it is well worth it.

(-)The advertised hard disk capacity of 100 GB was a key deciding point for me. At that time, this laptop had one of the highest available capacity drives. I think 120GB was the only one that topped this. and 160GB may have been in the stratospheric levels. AFter buying it I discovered that the shows only 87-88GB available. The reason is that about 5GB is 'hidden' with the install files in a seperate partition. and the rule about manufacturers rounding out their GB o the nearest billionth byte means that the HD is only a true 92GB HD.

(-)The system suffered from lot of Bloatware, which needs to be uninstalled. The drivers for the DVD reader / writer were iffy and the DVD writer would stop working properly after some time. It required reinstallation of the DVD creator software to get it working well. AFter a while (maybe an year and half) even that stopped fixing theproblem and essentially the DVD drive works only as a reader. Maybe a complete fresh install will help.

(-)There is quite a bit of battery wiggle in the back.

(+)There are three USB, 1 firewire, 1 network and 1 Phone line in which are quite adequate.

(-)There is no webcam and the speakers sound weak.

(+)The display screen is marvellous to say the least. This has to be the sole redeeming feature of this laptop. I could not find such a great screen in any other laptop that I used. If I ever buy another Sony again, the screen has to be the main reason behind the purchase!

(-)The laptop gets heated pretty fast. so putting it on one's lap was always out of the question.

(-)Because the display is so great, the laptop hardly runs 1 Hr 15 min on battery - making it essentially a near desktop replacement. the 15 inch xtra brite screen would mean that it drains out the battery pretty quick. This will be the sole reason that I will go for a smaller screen laptop the next time.

(+)Inspite of the all the -ves i have listed, the very fact that hte laptop lasted three years without any major problems (other than the DVD) is a big plus IMO. for me reliability and dependability trumps everything else. I never had to replace the OS or reinstall it.

I use a logitech MX3200 wireless kebyoard and mouse and this sort of ensured that the keys dont appear worn out. though the left clik button on the scrollpad shows it weared out.

The recovery partiiton helps you to create two Recovery DVDs for emeregency .

I had loaded Ubuntu on the machine for a short while (After wiping out the existing XP). Ubuntu works fine out of the box - the wifi is good as well. However the sound drivers used by Ubuntu do not do any justice to the speakers. After a few weeks I went back to using XP.

I used the recovery disks and terminated the process after the first DVD was ejected . This was sufficient ot load the XP fully and the drivers and eliminated half the bloatware. After un-installing most of the other bloatware and vaio utilities, XP with SP3 is quite fast and runs just 29 processes in all. However the Note book still runs quite hot. Running a temp monitoring software I recorded temperatures of 78 degree C routinely.

I realise that this model is long since dead and there is no point in writing a review now - but this is summing up my experience with the notebook

Update: April 2009.

During this time, I had also installed Windows 7 Beta which worked pretty well out of the box. The Windows User Experience Score was a lowly 2.0, hampered by the 4200 rpm hard drive which is quite slow. I had used a spare 2gb SO-DIMM stick lying around and there was no problem with the notebook recognising 3GB of RAM even though its tech specs say it was designed only for 2 GB.

Windows 7 worked quite well and I was happy with the performance. The temperatures on the laptop were still quite high. in between I had opened it up and cleaned the fan of all the gunk that built up in three years. But that did not help lower the heat being generated.

And finally ... six months after the previous update, this laptop finally died on me. It simply refuses to Power on or Pass POST. I am assuming its a motherboard problem and the heat finally got to it - I have not yet dissected the computer yet.

It turns out the laptop lasted 3 years and 4 months in all.

Update Sep 2010

It turns out that the laptop was dead for only about six weeks. one day it booted up mysteriously and has been working fine ever since. At 4 Yrs 9 Months, this is being used for netflix streaming at present.

3.0 out of 5 stars After almost 3 years, doesn't hold up well, September 25, 2008

By 

gringote (Mid-Missouri) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Sony VAIO VGN-FS760/W 15.4" Laptop (Intel Pentium M Processor 750, 512 MBRAM, 100 GB Hard Drive, DVD+R Dbl Layer/DVD+/-RW Drive) (Personal Computers)

My wife is the primary user of this laptop. She takes pretty good care of it, although admittedly not the BEST care of it. Some of the keyboard buttons don't work anymore. One of them is her fault, the rest are just wear and tear. The left mouse button has to be mashed very hard to respond as do some of the other keys. The battery life was never very good and now it doesn't work at all - and the power cable has a short in it so if you dont hold it just right it turns off. Very annoying. At first it was a good computer, but now it's really slow and breaking down physically.