... I probably would've made an more intelligent purchase. As it stands, I'm rather disappointed with this laptop in general. As with all new computer purchases, it works great for roughly three months, but then I began experiencing problems with the laptop as time went on.

Bad points:

The hard drive: What was promised as a 6 gig drive, was actually a 4.5 gig with the last .5 compressed into 2 gigs to equal five. There were three partitions on my hard drive which seemed to indicated this in FDISK. Shortly after the 90 day period from purchase, the compressed partition developed bad sectors. Sony customer service has been thoroughly unhelpful in attempting to alleviate the problem (long hold times, horrible service reps).

Display: In my fourth month of ownership the display developed three purple pixels in random parts of the screen. When I confronted sony customer service, they informed me it was their policy to only ticket the display if it had more than /5/ pixels not complying with the graphics being displayed.

Support: I cannot stress the necessity of good customer service with products like this. Having worked in a customer support center, personally, I know that even some of the worst products can make a customer happy if proper steps are taken to correct problems. I may have gotten a bad notebook of the bunch, but Sony's "support" has been awful thus far.

Sound: The builtin speakers, while in stereo, still sound rather tinny. However, if you plug this thing into a port replicator and hookup external speakers, after long-term use, the output and the speakers sound scratchy.

Good points!

OS: I've run this laptop through two operating systems, win98 and RedHat Linux 6.0. The laptop seems capable of handling both, although there is no sound support under RH60, I recommend using 6.1 or above with this laptop.

DVD-ROM: I have not had any problems using the DVD-ROM on this laptop, in fact, it's better than my DVD player in my living room at times. I prefer watching my movies in my den on this than in the living room anyway :)

PCMCIA: This laptop can handle two type-II's or one type-III. I use a type-II NIC and on occasion a type-III. I have not had any problems with the PCMCIA slots.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend this laptop based on my experiences. I'll have to avoid Sony in general due to the lack of support/service, and I just am thankful I was a casual user and not using this laptop for business purposes.



Recommended: No