Customer Reviews

Sony VAIO VGN-FZ140E/B 15.4-inch Laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7100, 2 GB RAM, 200 GB Hard Drive, Vista Premium)

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(17)

 

 

I own it only for a week now. Yet to explore several features. First impression is very good. Build quality is very good. No drag, faster, lighter. Wireless connection is good. Screen quality is good. Best thing is the video chat. Built-in camera mic are way better than my Logitech Quickcam Fusion(which is supposed to be one of the best).
Played DVD quite nicely while downloading, doing other stuff. S-video works well.

Did not test DVD writer. Did not try playing media without booting OS yet. Did not stress test the system yet.

The Good:
1) Screen quality (compared to many other laptops).
2) Build quality, looks - SOLID
3) Comes with Wireless - N.
4) Intel's Newer Graphics chipset, better for Vista Aero.
5) My old sony used to have fan noise. This one is pretty good there.
6) Considering it is Sony, the price is pretty good. Got it for 1149 at Circuit City.

The Bad:
1) It is still pricey.
2) Does not have graphics card, for gamers.
3) Does not have HDMI.
4) Battery life is poor about 1.5-2 hours with power save mode on!!
5) I think the resolution for 15.4 inch should be better. It supports only 1280x800 otherwise what is the use of bigger screen, it will only reduce battery life.
6) Does not come with remote for media play. Play, pause, volume control buttons cannot be accessed with display closed.
7) Speaker quality is below average.
8) No built-in bluetooth support.


Will update the review later as I put the laptop to use.

Update:
1)Battery life is poor.
2)Below average speaker quality.
3)No bluetooth.
4)Not had any problems with Vista(yet).
4)Graphics performance is good for a laptop with integrated graphics w/shared memory(Good job, Intel).
5)Lots of pre-installed junk.
6)Many websites with streaming videos won't work with opera/Firefox. I think it is Windows Media player issue.
7)IE stops accepting mouse input sometimes, only way out is to restart IE.
8)Mouse key is hard and noisy.

With all these I would say it is still excellent overall, barring battery life.

The Sony FZ-140, 150, and 160 are nice light machines with a really pretty LCD panel, but lack a number of features that should be included for the premium price and between Vista, Intel, and Sony have a number of buggy features. A star off for the price/performance issue and a star off for the bugs, so 3 stars overall.

This review was written on a FZ150E with a T7300 and a 160 GB hard drive and Vista Home Premium; besides the choice of processor, hard drive, and OS the difference between these three models is very slight. The 140 has a T7100 processor and the 160 a slightly larger but slower drive. Other than that, they all have the same features: 2 GB of RAM, the Intel X3100 graphics card, a DVD-RW drive, and similar inputs, outputs and controls.

The good stuff first. It's a true, light laptop at just over 5 lbs, but despite that the gorgeous 15.4" widescreen LCD is oversized for a laptop this small and shows Sony learned something from making LCD HDTVs. Setup is reasonably brainless, and while Sony did include a bunch of trial software some of it is useful - Spy Sweeper, Norton AntiVirus, and MS Office all are nicely preloaded. Controls are intuitive and the keyboard good, and a few interfaces like Firewire, S-Video out (but not in), and a switch for turning wireless off are nice.

The bad stuff overwhelms this, though. The minor stuff is annoying; trial versions of everything from Sony software to Spiderman 1 and 2 (that you get to buy if you want to watch) that take a while to delete, a touchpad that occasionally floats your mouse around, and restore CDs that you have to make yourself. There aren't parallel, serial, or PCMCIA card ports - Sony isn't alone in dropping them as obsolete - but Sony made a big mistake in not including a HDMI output as they do on the FZ180 and up, and replacing Bluetooth with Sony-approved memory card slots makes no sense. Vista is as clunky as advertised, but that's not Sony's fault, and I'd suspect if this was running XP the battery life would move from lousy to so-so. More major are how this lacks a Blu-Ray drive, how the X3100 simply won't support a number of applications (let alone run them like molasses) given its inability to render some shapes, and how the 1280x800 maximum resolution is great for DVDs but lousy for running spreadsheets or reading smaller fonts. Sony rectified the former two problems on the 180 series along with including an HDMI output, but resolution below 1050 vertical lines (SXGA+ and the widescreen equivalents) is major if you're running business software. All these are things that should have been included at this price.

The lack of included hardware is disappointing, but the deal-killer is the performance. It's hard to tell if it's Sony or Intel, but this would often take 10 minutes to connect to a simple 802.11b WEP network. Certain Java apps ran like utter molasses, to the point where keystrokes would often have to be repeated. And finally, the incompatibility of the X3100 with any number of applications can't be emphasized enough; this is clearly not a high end desktop replacement. (Surprisingly, it wasn't Vista's fault at all; swapping Sony and Intel for different brands but the same OS, processor, and RAM eliminated the problem. Sony's support was entirely unable to troubleshoot the first two issues.)

The 180 and 190 series have more bells and whistles, but in any case it's hard to argue for a substantial premium for what you're getting even if it's a darned pretty machine. It's why this has been returned, and 3 stars overall.

Pros:
- Good performance, even on power saver mode
- Very bright display (I normally use it at half brightness because it is actually TOO bright sometimes)
- Beautiful laptop

Cons:
- Too much useless software. It took me a few days to configure it to where I could use it without sorting through the junk in the menu's.
- Battery life is average, even with brightness down all the way.
- Battery jiggles slightly if touched, but this hasn't caused me a problem yet.
- Mouse buttons are noisy and hard to press. I've learned to use the tap feature on the touch pad.
- Only two USB ports that are very close together. I can't charge my ipod shuffle and have anything else plugged in at the same time because of the space between the USB ports.

Although I did come up with more cons than pros, I can easily work around each of the cons, and this laptop is still wonderful.

I purchased this notebook about a week ago and so far it has exceeded my expectations. This very light computer is very stylish and powerful at the same time.

Pros:

1) Number 1, the price was great! 1149 at Circuit City with Spywear Software, printer, and router!

2) Right when I turned it on, it felt fast to me. With a 1.88 Ghz Intel Processor, it's fast.

3) Comes with 2GB of RAM/Memory. Perfect for running Microsoft Vista.

4) 200GB Hard Drive makes it have a lot of storage.

5) Vista is unbelievable! Everyone who comments saying how bad Vista is, is wrong! They probably don't even have a computer with Vista on it!

Cons:

1) Battery. I get about 3.5 hours worth of battery and that's with the brightness/computer performance down to it's low.

2) A ton of preloaded Sony junk when you first turn it on. It took me about 3 hours to get it all off.

3)The button to select (the clicker) is very noisy but you get use to it after a while.

That's about it! I highly recommend this computer to a student or just about anybody else!

purchased this to replace my less than 2 yr old hp notebook which stopped working after 15 mo and then again 5 months later. Hoping this will have fewer problems.

things I like better: the screen is brighter, clearer and bigger at the same overall weight. better keyboard.the built in microphone and camera.

For the first three weeks that I spent with my beautiful, shiny, new Sony Vaio, all was bliss. The unit was lightweight and stylish, the processor speedy - all in all, a favorable first impression.
Unfortunately, this relationship quickly turned sour. Three weeks after purchase, six of the (non-adjacent, non-function keys) suddenly stopped working. I tried every software/OS troubleshooting option available on Sony's customer support website to no avail. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with Sony's script-reading, eager-to-help but not particularly useful technical support, but, alas, the relationship that hard started so promisingly now took an ugly turn.
So now, I sit with a $1300 (+tax) paperweight while I wait for Sony to send me a box in which I can ship my 3-week old machine back to them for repair (note, Sony does not offer local repair as an option for notebooks under warranty. They do offer the option of 'on-site' repair, which they'll happily provide you for only $150).
In short, if you're looking for reliability and effective, rapid, helpful customer service, you may be best served by looking elsewhere for your notebook computing needs.

I'm a Mac user, but I decided to buy this laptop for my mom, she's a PC user and refuses to change... When it arrived it looked OK, but the camera didn't work... and a week later nothing worked, every time I turned it on, I got the system setup message....
I called Sony and told them all my problems, try to get it to a repair store, but they said they couldn't do anything for me, I has to sent back the laptop to Amazon... I'm still waiting for a new replacement!

I love the laptop but I agree with other people: SONY should allow XP downgrade and also should NOT load all of those unneccessary software. It takes forever to unistall them.

One of the 1GB ram memories doesn't work, notebook sent as a gift to my brother in south america, sony doesn't cover warranty outside the US, now the computer has to be sent back.....what a nightmare.

I'm fairly happy with my new vaio. It's quick enough doing most tasks. In all, it basically has the same features that all modern laptops have. The 200gb hard drive is nice, although when I got mine only about 180 of it showed up and another 20 was filled with vista and bloatware. When I say bloatware, I mean useless trials galore. Seriously, I understand that computer manufacturers get paid to put this stuff on there, but I expected a little better from Sony. I've had this for a few days and there are still AOL programs floating around.

Anyway, the wireless is fast, the screen is beautiful, the computer itself is fairly light, the webcam is clear, the instant on is nice (though I don't know if I will ever use it), and it is far more quiet than my 3 year old toshiba.

As for cons, bloatware had this computer at a stuttering crawl when I first started it up (it took several minutes on each start up just to become usable). The left and right click buttons are sort of loud when used. The graphics accelerator although better than the previous versions is still woefully weak. This computer scored around 900 on 3dMark 05.

In the end I give it five stars because although it's not the best out there, I payed around $8** for it at Best Buy through a combination of deals, which is a just a slight bit better than the original [...]. Had I paid the full 1300 that it retails for I would probably rate this at 4 stars.

One other thing, I as of yet have had no problems with Windows Vista whatsoever. Granted it is more of a resource hog than Xp, but then again my [...] dollar 2003 toshiba laptop had 512ddr and my [...] dollar 2007 sony has 2048ddr2.