Customer Reviews

Sony VAIO VGN-SZ360P/C 13.3" Laptop (Intel Core Duo 2 Processor T7200, 2 GB RAM, 120 GB Hard Drive, DVD+R Double Layer / DVD?RW Drive)

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

 

 

This is the third Vaio notebook in our family at this time, and this is by far the best. I got started on Vaio's for their brillaint displays - if you are going to stare at a computer screen all day, you might as well get the best one! I travel a lot so I was looking for the lightest notebook I could find with a great display and decent keyboard. This is the feature that has blown me away the most. This keyboard is fully 12 inches wide (keys on 19mm pitch), the same as my 14" and 17" Vaio's and fully one inch wider than the 17" laptop my company provided me! The key action is wonderful. I was not expecting such a nice, usable keyboard in such a small format notebook! Next best feature is the weight. I just got back from a convention where I decided to walk from the hotel to the convention center and back (one mile each way) each day for 4 days. With my laptop (no power supply ). Absolutely no problem. In fact, several times a day, I had to open my briefcase and check to make sure my Vaio was in there, it is so light. This carbon fiber top is totally cool. It is very thin and very high tech to look at, yet the strength and rigidity is truly remarkable. A next good feature is the Core Duo 2 T7200 processor. Very powerful (much more powerful than my daughter's 3GHz P4!) yet the fan is hardly ever at full speed, but even when it is, it is never annoying. If it does bother you, you can get into Sony's power management system and set the fan manually to one of 5 speed settings or adaptive. But the fan is never intrusive. 120GB is big enough for me. I have decided not to do my photo stuff on this machine but use my desktop. Finally, is XP. I didn't really need a new laptop now, but after using Vista on my company's computer, I paniced. Vista is way slower than XP, takes a lot of disc space and is a memory hog, and I hear now the security is no better than XP. So I quickly got a new notebook with XP! This is the nicest laptop I have every had. Sure Vaio's are pricey - but I am a big believer that you more or less get what you pay for. I love this computer and I am so glad I got this model. I have no interest in the WAN version and having Bluetooth is a nice plus. I have the docking station and a really nice 21" LCD for the office. Ironically, the full-size keyboard is no better than the Vaio's. You will love this computer!!!!

I almost bought a Dell XPS M1210. My significant other bought one. It has an option for a 7200rpm drive, and if you have the extra cash, it can take up to 4GB RAM. (It's pretty pricey, though.) Unfortunately, the M1210 is butt ugly, heavier than it should be, and when he got it, he had to spend a bunch of time on the phone with Dell to get it to work properly. (And he's a software engineer.)

I decided that I didn't care about the drive speed, and 2GB of RAM would be plenty for me, so I bought the Vaio (both of us had previously owned Vaios). Now I get to point and laugh. My Vaio is sleek, fast, and worked flawlessly out of the box. I think there's something to be said for Sony's history as a consumer electronics company: they put more thought into user experience. It's enjoyable to use a laptop that looks cool. And if you've ever had a laptop that had lots of little issues that were non-terminal but really annoying, you can appreciate the virtue of one that works perfectly from the moment you first power it up. Go Sony.

Fantastic laptop. Very light, slim and extremely fast. From my own experience, the battery life is no longer than 3 hours on stamina mode, but that is still much longer than any of my previous laptops. ( I must say I like the screen to be quite bright, so that might account for the shorter battery life). It is also very quiet, to the point of being almost silent and does not overheat.
So why 4 stars?
I have been having difficulties with the company that is handling the "Free upgrade to Vista". Very unreliable. I had to submit the proof of purchase 7 times to get them to confirm receiving it. I hope their delivery service - when the time comes - will be improved. Also the quality of the integrated webcam is quite poor (only 0.13 mpix). One would thought that after all the hi-tech Sony have put into this Laptop, they would have installed a better webcam.
Apart from that, a great laptop, which I would recomend to anybody looking for a light and powerfull machine who would not mind the slightly-high (but absolutely justified in my mind) price.

Folks here have covered the good bits, and just to reiterate - this lappie does get boiling hot, and can burn legs, especially if you're hammering the graphics by playing, say, World of Warcraft.

Secondly, the keyboard is super clattery and *loud*. If you're a blogger, and you like to type during conference talks, sometimes you will get shushed. That's really annoying.

My vaio shipped with the Bluetooth gremlin toggled off, so I had to get that fixed shortly after getting it out of the box; also, hibernate is indeed dodgy: it won't work if you have the graphics set to 'speedy' rather than 'stamina'.

Otherwise, I'm happy enough. It's light, sleek, and does the job.

I purchased this notebook after extensive comparison done between this one and the HP dv2000 series. I was looking for a light weight notebook with powerful performance since I bring my notebook with me everyday between home and office. Unfortunately, the HP notebook is not available in all retail stores and Internet prior to the Christmas, so I settled on the Sony SZ360.

Amazon price for this product is probably the best on the Internet and I got the shipment the next day I ordered it and only paid $19 for shipping and no tax. So this deal is difficult to beat if you decided on buying this notebook.

The SZ360 is nicely styled with a close-to-Apple quality (but I think Apple still has the best design out there). If the style of a notebook is important to you, I'm sure you'll find most of the Windows notebook out there have very bad styling inin general.

Another plus is the fingerprint function which is pretty neat and very easy to setup, I've been using it to login both the system power-up and the Windows Welcome screen at once everytime and it is fairly accurate and save me the time I have to spend standing beside the notebook waiting for the Windows screen to come up, now I can just turn the Power ON and scan my finger right away and just walk away and come back in a few minutes.

One problem area which I really wished Sony could done a better job is the keyboard on this machine. The keyboard is very loud for me as a touch typist and the keys are not designed well to give user a nice feedback when I type really fast. As a result, the typing error are much worse when I used this keyboard. This is just annoying and for a $2000 notebook, Sony should spend more effort to design a better keyboard.

Another drawback is the noise of the CPU fan when I worked late alone. The noise is difficult to miss even though I'm not usually someone pay much attention to such thing.

Because of the small size of SZ360, the height of the notebook LCD screen is very low compared to a normal LCD monitor and I found it can cause shoulder stress and pain as I spent too much time working on the notebook. I will suggest to get something to elevate the notebook to a normal height or buy the optional Docking Station. I'll order the Docking Station myself to see if this problem can be improved.

After 13 months of occasional use, the hard drive failed. Two months later the power supply died, the next month the motherboard went south.

Based on that experience with Sony, I wouldn't recommend this product.

I've started to use this notebook in replacement of a Dell Latitude. That was a fine rugged equipment with a 15,4" screen, quiet and reliable, but looks like a dinosaur if you compare them. This is an amazing processing machine. Incredibly light, very quiet, the angle of view is awesome, no darkening when you look from the side.
I thougt the Duo 2 2,0 gigs with 2GB ram would be faster, to be honest. But it does the job, any job. You can open 15, 17 pictures of 17Mb on Photoshop and still work fast in each.
Yes, the battery is kind of loose, the stand by and hibernation functions does not always work as they should, but then, is Windows XP flawless?
As for the Vista upgrade, yes, the Sony site is quite paranoid, but I managed to get through. Let's see if they really deliver it...

I have been using the Vaio for about a month now and it has worked flawlessly. Great for traveling with an awesome screen for DVD's and a fast processor and 2GB memory for work intensive applications. Keyboard is very comfortable and I was surprised at how much I ended up using the fingerprint reader for logging on to websites. I am very happy with this notebook.

Sony sells the most expensive computer you can buy and provides the worst customer service you will find.
Do yourself a favor and buy HP, Toshiba, Dell, or anything besides Sony.

It is a lightweight computer , the design is really good .
But do not waste USD 2149,00 as I paid for . I always had toshiba , a toshiba with the same configuration will cost USD 1200,00 . Of course it weights a little bit more . But doens't compense pay more for it . The battery take about 4 hours to get charged . Toshiba take 1 1/2 . The A/C Charger is also bigger than toshiba . I used to have a Toshiba Core Duo T5500 with 2 giga RAM , and 256 video card SHARED . And I can tell you that toshiba runs faster . Sony even with hibrid memory video and best processor ( 2,00 X 1,66-TOSHIBA ) , run a little bit slower . Toshiba come with a DVD recovery . Sony not ! The question is .... Sony weight 3,7 toshiba weight 5,0 . If you don't need lightweight buy toshiba . Sony also doesen't have a separate buttom to control volume . You have to do it on the keyboard . All right .. That's it ....