Recently purchased the new Sony VAIO PCG-F610 for my wife who has returned to college. I was looking for a budget laptop that would handle her term papers, clinical observations, etc. Leaning towards an HP, however, ran across the Sony for $1099.99 at Fry's, offered them $100 off for an open box. It has a 550 MHz AMD-K62 processor which made me a little nervous (call it the power of the Intel marketing).

Everything has worked great so far. I have had it on for several days now, no problems, and it stays much cooler than my Dell Latitude (company laptop.) Sony equips it with MS Word 2000 and a whole trunkload of video and photo software. With only a 6 GB HD, will probably need to dump some of that as time goes on, however, if you are really into photo editing, etc., you are ready to go.

The 12.1" SVGA TFT screen is good quality and so much better than the HPA's that tend to dominate this price range. The PC Card slots and other interfaces (serial, USB(2), port replicator, etc.) far exceed many of the others I have looked at. The Gateway, for example, in this price range only provides two USB's.

The only "lock up" that I have experienced has been with AOL 6.0 that I upgraded on the machine from it's provided 5.0. Twice it has caused the machine to lock up, requiring a power off. Windows ME "active recovery" handled it with no problem. I think that it is a problem inherent in AOL 6.0, as I have had problems with it on my old 150 MHz Pentium desktop at home. I have installed a wide range of various programs, including Palm Pilot sync software, and it's handled them all just fine.

All in all, I am very pleased. Will provide another review in a couple of months after we have had it in use for awhile.





Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 999.99
Operating System: Windows
Processor: AMD K-2
Processor speed: 501-600
Screen Size: 12"
RAM: 64
Internal Storage: CD-ROM
Hard Drive (GB): 4-6