Customer Reviews

Sony VAIO VGN-S460P/B 13.3" Laptop (Intel Pentium M Processor 740, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, DVD+R Dbl Layer/DVD+/-RW Drive)

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

 

 

I have used this laptop for 6 months, it has great performance definitly, i can play many high end games on this laptop and they look GREAT on the bright vibrant screen.

There is one problem though, the motherboard on these are very faulty, it seems at random my system will be dead. The mouse is dead, the screen is on but, you know the system isnt working.

It seems to do this randomly.. somes times a week without it, or maybe 3 in a day, i also encounter the blue screen of death a lot...(the microsoft crash) which SHOULD be very rare on an XP machine.

the keyboard layout is nice, when you get it it takes alittle time to get used to, but i type just as fast on this as a normal keyboard.

there are 2 usb ports, they are on the right side of the laptop so it makes using a mouse very akward.

This laptop is SO powerful and small, so its only natural that it would get hot, and when it gets hot the fan goes on...

overall its average... but for the price i'd go withsomething else

Every thing is great about this laptop except the heating problem. It gets heated from the front right side. I dont know why is it so. My friend has this one and that gets heated too. Otherwise, this is a marvellous state of art and fashionable Laptop.

Pro: Fabulous screen, great form factor

Con: Unbelievably annoying fan, unreliable, mediocre build quality

(note: I have the VGN-S260P - same notebook w/Pentium 735, smaller HD and only DVD-ROM)

Sony is the closest thing the Windows world has to Apple level product design. Unfortunately they always seem to screw it up with a few major flaws. This is the second slim VAIO notebook I have purchased (1st was a Z505) and it certainly will be the last.

The screen is truly awesome, brilliant and high contrast (although skin tones are not very natural for digital photo editing). As a side note, small bright letterbox format screens are surprisingly great for those of us with post 40 year old eyes that need bifocals - you get a lot of real estate yet you don't have to tilt your head back so far to read it. The overall size and weight are great and I find the keyboard and touchpad to be excellent - although I really wish it had an IBM style pointing device.

Unfortunately the quality leaves a lot to be desired. The plastic surrounding the keyboard bows up around the power button. I would have returned it for that but every one I looked at had the same problem and one look at the design makes it obvious that warping will occur. Mine also has a bad pixel (red one always on). Worse is the fact that after only a few uses I was on a business trip and needed to get some work done in the hotel - just as I was plugging a USB cable in it clicked off and went completely, totally dead. Sony service told me that they have had a lot of problems with motherboards dying on these. They also told me they had to wipe my disk clean losing all my data - why a dead motherboard requires that is beyond me. To add insult to injury, despite packing it very carefully and inserting a note to please be careful, it returned with a big scratch on the lid.

All of that would be forgivable if it wasn't for the most unbelievably annoying fan I have ever experienced. If it is on AC power there is NOTHING you can do to make the fan shut up (short of a bat). Even with the most aggressive power saving settings the fan will run - even when the machine is sitting doing nothing with the screen off! And it is not just that it runs - it is variable speed and yet it cycles on and off at ~10 second intervals, you can't imagine how annoying that is, it would be better if it just would pick a middling speed and stay on. But that is not all, the fan noise is not just the air moving, it is obviously a very cheap motor because the noise is predominantly motor/bearing noise of a character that after a few minutes drives you nuts and makes you want to go out and do something very antisocial. I have a new mini tower desktop (dual core Pentium) that sits 2 feet from me yet I can hear this laptop over it even though it is on a docking station at least 6 feet away.

The only redeeming aspect is the fact that if you set it to max power saving mode and run it on the battery the fan will actually shut off - as long as you don't do anything more than simple word processing. Unfortunately the performance goes down dramatically but at least you get pretty good battery life.

So if you're going to buy one of these get the big battery and a set of earplugs.

Good and reliable altghough slow at times due to the processor speed. Using it for over 5 years now. It has been used heavealy (approx 10 /hrs a day). upgraded memory to 1 GB and hard drive to 320G to keep up wiht teh demand.

I've gotten a lot of hours out of my VGN-S460P. The main selling aspect which prompted me to buy this computer was the weight - being light. However, it has always run on the hot side, and for the past 6 months the fan has been extremely noisy. I was living on a very remote island, so I wasn't sure what to do. I thought maybe it just needed cleaning, but finally one computer guy said it needed a new fan. Like others have mentioned, the noise is enough to make you feel self-conscious when you know that everyone else in the same room/space can hear it. It also made me fearful that the computer would simply die on me. Not good when you have 5 years of pictures and documents on it even though most of this is saved on flash drives - but still...

It can also be extremely slow.

Having said all of this, I am purchasing another Sony. The reviews on the one I am buying indicate that it is a good machine. Hopefully, it won't have the same problems.

Machine is good but the description in Amazon was not so.
I was trying to know if the machine has one 512 RAM or two 256 RAMs. But I could not find any relevant info. So, I just assumed that it might have the same RAM configuration as those in the other markets (bestbuy, etc), which had one 512 RAM. I bought one planning add one 512 RAM to make the total 1G.

But when I got the machine I found it had two 256 RAMs so that I took one of them out and put 1G RAM instead.

Sun