Customer Reviews

Sony VAIO VGN-FZ160E/B 15.4-inch Laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7300, 2 GB RAM, 200 GB Hard Drive, Vista Premium)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I just bought this computer about three weeks ago. Love the screen, bluray player is beautiful, super fast. I upgraded it to 4gb of ram but it was fast without it. I bought it for design work. Runs the entire Adobe CS3 Suite super fast.

Cons: Took me two days to uninstall all of the trial and other junk software installed by Sony. Battery life is horrible. I bought another power supply so I have one at work and one at home. The minute I unplug the thing from the wall it says 91% battery life remaining. ??? I have never seen such horrible battery life. I got used to my old Gateway that gave me 4 hours of battery life. I'm lucky if I get an hour just browsing the internet. This above all is the only thing that is bad about this machine. If the battery were better I would give it five stars.

I purchased a computer and it arrived. Taking the machine out of the box, I was very pleased with the look and feel and design of the computer itself. However, after the computer booted up, I realized just how unusable this product was out of the box. The machine comes with more trialware installed than any reasonable person should have to put up with. The software was so overrun with trialware that the machine crawled after booting up. All of the trialware started popping up dialogs asking me to update my software and and asking me to purchase full versions. The computer was utterly useless. I had to format the computer and put a clean version of Windows Vista on the box. However, this machine doesn't come with ANY disk -- not even a recovery disk. If you want a recovery disk, you have to pay for it. The downside to that is, even if you had a recovery disk, you'd still end up installing all of the trialware again.

Sony did a great job with the computer, but their execution on the full user experience makes me rate this computer poorly. Had Sony at least given me the ability to completely wipe the computer to a clean Vista install, I would have rated it a 2. Had they simply supplied installation CDs for the trialware and shipped the clean machine without anything pre-installed, I would have given this computer a 4 our of 5. Thanks for listening.

I was nervous about buying a new computer with Windows Vista, but, this computer is sweet! It is fast and has improved my ability to communicate with my office significantly. Other than a blip with one program, which I was able to fix with an upgrade to the program, Vista has worked fine.

The computer itself is thin, lightweight, and a great performer. I was able to watch feeds from Live Earth this past weekend -- it was able to keep up and give me a very decent screen to watch. I look forward to taking it on the road and viewing DVDs. The touchpad mouse is an improvement from my last laptop as it is not quite as smooth and responds better to my movement. To-date the battery life has been better than my previous model as well.

Sony VAIO VGN-FZ180E/B 15.4" Notebook PC (Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7300, 2 GB RAM, 200 GB Hard Drive, Vista Home Premium)

I own a 1st generation Powerbook Aluminum. And while I love my PB it is getting quite 'long in the tooth'. I was shopping for a replacement, and the new MacBooks start at $1999.00. A bit pricey. So I started looking at Windows laptops. The VAIO, by far, offers the best feature set, for the amount of money spent. Intel Centrino Core 2 Duo 2GH processor, 2GB ram, 200GB HD, and a Blu-Ray disc burner for under $1400!!

The machine is very peppy. The xbrite display is jaw dropping gorgeous! Very bright, colors seem vibrant, warm.

Setup was a breeze, and Vista practically connected itself, to my wireless network.

The laptop is very robust. I have had several programs open at once, including a desktop workspace manager application, for managing multiple desktops, and I did not experience any performance issues.

If there is a 'downside' to this laptop, it is that Sony loads it with so much bloatware, adware, trialware, none of which - in my opinion - adds any value to the machine. Boot-up time, out of the box, was a bit slow, but was noticeably faster, and quite acceptable, once I eliminated non-essential programs, from startup.

Simply put, build/finish is very nice, solid feel, robust management of multiple applications with little degradation in performance, inclusion of Blu-Ray burner sealed the deal, as the features provided, are well worth the money that was spent. A good value!

I agree with a lot of people on how much junk Sony preloads on this computer. I have removed a lot of it, but there is still more to go.. I've been using this computer about 1 month and have had NO problems.. Definitely worth what I paid for it!

I bought this laptop VGN-FZ160E when it was just released in May 07. It turned out to be a good deal and good value for money at that time especially since it was shipped from amazon.. There was a lot of unnecessary crap-ware installed which took a while and lots of patience to get rid of. I'd rather not have the trial versions at all. Also I noticed that the left mouse button on the touch pad is slightly depressed than the right mouse button, but seemed odd enough to be a manufacturing defect, which apparently is 'normal'. Hmm.. I even called Sony tech support as a result, who were less than useful. They even asked me to check driver settings, after clearly being told it was a hardware problem!!! The mouse sometimes has a mind of its own. Flaky. Haven't figured that one out yet. All in all, the physical construction seems to be weaker than you would expect from a Sony, but it is still a decent deal. Oh, and the angle along the horizontal axis, meaning tilt the screen up and down, is quite small without the colours deteriorating . Even my 6 year old Mac is substantially better. Excellent deal if you aren't too picky about the above.

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.

The design of the computer is very nice with silver color, also the weight of the computer is light compared with other same sizes computers.

Display is very blight, it looks good.

Vista works smoothly, but this computer is not good for computer gamers because on the Vista, graphic rating is just 3.3. Probably 3D games do not work.

Overall, it is totally cool and sophisticated, but other VAIO upper models are better.

I dont know if it is a good news or bad news for you but Unfortunately,this computer does not have BLUETOOTH TECHNOLOGY !!!! I had bought a Original Sony VAIO BLUETOOTH MOUSE and now I can not use my mouse on this computer !!!..This is not a mistakee..This is a FAULT !SONY DOES NOTHING ANYMORE..I HOPE YOU WILL NOT BUY THIS ITEM..! Exact These computers , every notebooks exact this HAVE BLUETOOTH..

I brought this laptop on Amazon on December 25, 2007.After purchase I have uninstalled all the trail wares and zunkwares from Sony.Solid laptop still it is going strong