Customer Reviews

Sony VAIO VGN-SZ460N/C 13.3" Laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 2 GHz Processor, 2 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, DVD RW Drive, Vista Business)

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

 

 

Pros:
-Design
-Lightweight
-Very good screen resolution
-Very good wired and wireless connection application
-Very good wireless reception
-Nice and friendly Sony software application for administration and update purposes.
-Long cord power adapter
-All features work as promised or advertised
-Wake up/start time is fast. From the time you turn it on to the time you are actually in your desktop it takes about 4 to 10 seconds.

Cons:
-The computer is very noisy. The fan and the hard drive. Mostly the fan
-It produces a lot of heat.
-Battery time (I expected to last at least 3 hours). But in certain and common conditions the battery ends very fast.
-Graphic card is not as good as expected in terms of overall performance.
-Heavy power adapter. That is a minus compare to the excellent lightweight of this laptop
-Keyboard is not as good as other computers for experienced typewriters: I am an experienced typewriter and I found my self having a hard time writing with this keyboard. From time to time the letters don't show up in the screen. All because you have to press the keyboard all the way down and it is not that sensitive compared to IBM, DELL or MAC laptops I have used. This type of keyboard makes afraid of having my hands tired after writing long documents or just a few letters. So if you have the chance to try it your self first, you should. So you can feel how comfortable you feel using this keyboard

As overall performance the laptop with Vista OS show the following windows scores based on the new windows Experience Index base score.
-Processor: Calculations per second => 4.9
-Memory (RAM): memore operations per second => 4.5
-Graphics: Desktop performance for Windows Aero => 3.6
-Gaming graphics: 3D business and gaming graphics performance => 3.3
-Primary hard disk: Disk data transfer rate => 4.7

Overall score is determined by the lowest subscore. That is 3.3.

I recommend it for those of you looking for a lightweight laptop with nice design and features. Not for gamers or extreme graphic application users. For regular Microsoft Office users is just perfect.

Be aware of the heat and the noise it produces. And also make sure you try the keyboard first to see if you feel comfortable with it.

design - great
weight - good
noise - worst
battery - bad
monitor - great
price - not good
heat - worst (you can boil water)

I've used the vaio for 1 month. The noise and heat problems are big worst things. The vaio-sz is the best except the two things.

purchased the SZ460N/C and have been using it for almost three weeks. I decided on the Sony because of the Intel Core Duo 2 processor, battery life (about 4 hours), lightweight form factor,large hard drive space and the durability of the carbon fiber chassis. My old Toshiba Satellite M-35 with 15" screen laptop was broken after I used for 3 years. I took it back to Bestbuy, and they gave me a store credit for original price, so I purchased this new Sony VAIO. I like the express card slot because I own the Sony camera and Sony cell phone, and they both use the Memory Stick which easy for me to transfer the data. I like the keyboard a lot. it is soft and very comfortable. also the fingerprint scanner is great and truly awesome. It saves time for logging in and has a nice feature about remembering all of your passwords on website login pages.

The Sony bundle of software sucks. I have removed all the junk softwares. but, I would suggest very carefully removing these softwares. If you are not good with computers, find someone who is and they can easily remove all of the demo software.

The integrated camera is not great but for video conferencing and chatting it gets the job done.

The VGN-SZ460N was my fifth Sony Vaio laptop in the last 10 years - I frequently travel for business, constantly seek improved computing performance and like the Vaio designs. When I first received the SZ460N, I was once again impressed with the computing power, design and light weight. It took me several days to install my normal applications (Office, iTunes, Adobe, etc) and configure to my preferences. Unfortunately, I completed all of this installation and customization using an exterior USB mouse.

When I took the Vaio on my first business trip after its purchase, I noticed a peculiar phenomenon - the mouse pad motion was backwards! I.e. When I moved my finger left, the mouse moved right; down was up; vice-versa.

I initially attributed this to a one-time glitch, so I simply rebooted my computer. The problem disappeared. Over time, however, I realized that the problem actually occurred much more regularly, except that I hadn't noticed earlier due to the USB mouse.

I checked the mouse software; I downloaded and installed the latest mouse driver. None of these solved the problem. I contacted technical support. Despite my message stating that I had already re-installed the mouse driver, technical support suggested that I (once again) re-install the mouse driver. Obviously no success. I doubt whether the support technician even read my message. I wrote back and informed them that the solution was ineffective. Their response? A boilerplate message informing me that I should re-install my entire O/S.

I'm sorry, but I do not have the time/effort/patience to re-install the entire O/S, along with all of my other applications, in the "hopes" of fixing this problem. Incredible.

This is my 2nd Vaio, I bought it because of the great form factor (weight, size, etc). My first Vaio (an older model) worked very well. This one is just plain awful.

The key problem with the laptop is the _basics_ just don't work. The webcam freezes. The wireless configuration disappears. The sound output stops through multiple reboots. Don't even bother with the fingerprint sensor.

In my first 45 days I've re-installed Vista once, and have spent no less than 5 hours on the phone with tech support.

Don't buy it.

on April 29 I opened the box. Since the computer was for my wife, I sat with her. After two hours of trying to understand Vista, she left. I spent the next two weeks trying to figure out how to do the things I had done on xp. I finally got to the point where I could show my wife how to try out Office which terminated in less than 30 days. She was doing her email on May 26 when she decided to visit the bathroom. She returned to a dead machine. I wrote emails, chatted and called many time to speake to the Indian spokes persons. On May 30 Fedx delivered a collapsed box though I still had the orginal. It took two hours to assemble. On May 31, I delivered it to Fedx. Sony gave instruction to follow it's progress. When I tried it, Sony web site said it could not find the "Event" and told me tocall the number which I had labored on for five days. Maybe Sony appreciates this process - all I can think of thank god I got it through American Express with their backup warranty and american speaking help.

I was taken in by the sleek carbon based cover and thin design of this computer, along with the "promise" of "VISTA Business" software making my computing experience a great one. Boy what a mistake. I had a VAIO computer with XP prior to this purchase and it was a good computer ownership experience. This computer is by far, the worst combination of software, support, and hardware (especially at the price) , I've ever endured. I have many times tried to get support to fix the plethora of problems, from bluetooth inoperability, wireless problems, start up times, dual display presentation issues, native display issues, stand by issues, batter depletion, and so much more. I have NOTHING against SONY, except, they released drivers for XP, shortly after launching this model, because they full-well knew how much trouble this hardware/software combination really was. But, what turned me away from SONY, is the fact that they wanted to charge me to "downgrade" to XP, just to get a computer that works.
I have come close to rage using this computer and would NEVER recommend it. I tried so hard , and for soooo many parts of days to get it to simply work that I would tremble from frustration. I needed a computer for work, and this "review" may sound "whack", but I'm simply conveying my feelings about my ownership experience, and SONY's "support" of a bad, very bad computer.
Had I had more time when initially owning this computer, I would have fought with them tooth and nail to replace it. But they know people don't have time, or the resources most of the time for this. And they got me, but, I will NEVER EVER buy another SONY computer. They got me, but only once.

I got this laptop with Vista Business installed. Everything was buggy, the vaio power management would crash with a 'run32dll' error, and the screen would blank out unexpectedly as if it was trying to go to sleep even though I was typing on it. So, I obtained a vaio system recovery disk from the internet which only contained a driverless generic install of xp sp2 that works on most vaios (sony has some kind of license deal). I used that disk to wipe the hard drive and install two partitions, C and D and had xp placed on C. After xp was installed, I downloaded all of the xp drivers from the sony website. I then installed service pack 3 BEFORE installing the sony drivers. I did not install the camera drivers or fingerprint software (although I did install the fingerprint drivers). It is important to install all of the drivers so that power management can work properly I think. After doing this, I now have a fast, reliable computer that works ten times better than it did with vista business. It can play street fighter 4 at 59 fps very well although I had to monkey around with the settings in the game quite a bit (hint: dont use anti aliasing).

One annoying thing is that selecting the onboard video card (stamina mode) versus the nvidia 7400 seems to only make a difference of a few watts if you keep all of the other power settings the same! The whole purpose of me purchasing this laptop was for this function, and it doesnt work I have no idea why they bothered with this silly switch. (I tested power output with a killawatt meter.) With the nvidia card I am now using 24 watts, with the intel card I would be using about 22! During SF4 it jumps up to 44 watts, which is still better than the 150 watts the xbox uses, but possibly not better than the dell xps m1330 which uses 20 watts at idle and supposedly 35 watts when maxed out. Also, on occasion the screen blanks out for half a second, (not often though) though I think that is not a general problem but specific to the laptop I have. In retrospect, I would get the m1330 knowing what I now know about how many watts it actually uses. (Nothing on the internet about this until now). Though I havent ever used an m1330 so I dont know if it is really better or not. I upgraded the hard drive to 500gb following instructions on the internet (google it) and the upgrade wasnt too difficult and the drive appears to work great.

Overall this is a good laptop, (yes it IS ok for gaming) just be sure to put xp on it like I did and avoid vista at all costs!! I have a relatively portable laptop which can play games and do everything I want it to. I may purchase a 12 cell battery and see how many hours that will last.

problems with the wireless card - often it doesn't work - i.e. the computer can't recognize that it is present!

Hard to figure out if all of the problems are because of Vista or Sony...

Service Pack for vista completely messes everything up

the keyboard is very loud!

the jack for headphones doesn't always work properly

the Vaio service module shuts down often - i.e. 2-3x per week - which makes it impossible to dim the background light intensity

Customer service always has a simple solution - erase the hard drive and start over!

Is a powerful tool and efficient. I am very coforms with these acquisition of this notebook sonyvaio SZ460N