Good Idea, but the Z505 is better
Written: Jul 12 '00 (Updated Jul 13 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Light Weight, Small, Sleek, Stylish, Fast, Lots of Memory, Nice Screen, Great Weight
Cons: Screen is too small, Keyboard is a little too small, No NIC, you have to buy too many things along with the notebook
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| Skyleth's Full Review: Sony VAIO SR7K PC Notebook |
Sony's Vaio PCG-SR7K at first seems to be the perfect choice for anyone who wants an ultra portable notebook. But I strongly recommend that you look again.
FEATURES
Let's look at what the SR7K gives you:
10" TFT XGA Active Matrix Display: Excellent quality, no doubt there
12.0GB Fixed HardDisk: nice sized Hard Disk, twice the size of traditional notebook manufacturers
128MB RAM: can't complain there
Pentium III 600 MHz w/ Speed Step technology: Good thing it's speedstep because this battery would last all of 10 min otherwise
A roughly 90-95% keyboard: takes some getting used to
A 2.98LB (before battery) and 1" thin form factor: can't complain there
Windows2000 Professional: no problems... yet
Sony MagiGate MemoryStick slot: Good if you have a MemoryStick Walkman, CyberShot Camera, SlimTop VAIO, HigherEnd Sony Digital8/MiniDV camcorder, or CyberFrame.
But that's it, you might be wondering what about CD/DVD-ROM? What about Floppy Drives? What about a port replicator? Well, those don't come included. The only real dongle or add on you get is a Monitor Port Adapter.
FUNCTIONALITY
Well, for something that cost $2.5K I kind of expected more... the performance is great, and everything you would want to do on it is great too... the keyboard did take some getting used to. But the screen is just so small! If you are looking at ultrathin notebooks when you compare the Z505's 12" TFT XGA display vs. the SR7K's Active Matrix Display, the extra 2 inches make a world of difference! But for just a stand-alone computer for you to do your email and reports on the go, good choice, I just hope that your eyesight is good. You might be alarmed when you try it out at how warm it is running at, just remember, it is 600MHz (well, roughly 450 when the speedstep is kicking in) in a very very small space. With the battery in (which has some tiny legs on it) there was no ventilation problem for me... of course resting it on your lap might not be the best idea.
WHEN YOU ACTUALLY BUY IT...
Well, $2500 isn't so bad of a price to pay for portability, but once you add up what you have to buy on top of the notebook to get it to do what you want, that's something different. Here are the basics and their roughly estimated costs:
CD-ROM/DVD-ROM: 300 for the CD-ROM / 500 for the DVD-ROM (you might say, why don't i use a third party PCMCIA cdrom? well, there is some funky Sony thing, where I tried a TARGUS CDROM and it didn't work, but when I tried a Sony CDROM it worked beautifully, surprise)
Floppy Disk Drive: 80 for a USB Floppy Drive, although I myself never use a Floppy Drive any more, it is still something nice to have.
PCMCIA CardBus 10/100 Network Card: 150 and up. Unlike Sony's Z505s this has no built in network adapter. Of course there is only one PCMCIA slot on this... and a NIC is really the life line of most notebooks of today, for your company or at home, most people have some kind of network or cablemodem or whatever. NICs are important!
Port Replicator, or at least a USB HUB: Port Replicator for the Z505 costs around 100, I don't think they've made one available for the SR7K... yet... so let's hope. But a good 4 Port USB Hub should cost you around 30.
FINAL THOUGHTS
So in the end you're gonna tack on another... 580 to your price tag (300 for the CDROM, 170 for a PCMCIA Network Card, 80 for the Floppy, 30 for the USB HUB) Now for me, after seeing this final price being so close to the price of Sony's Z505JS notebook i'd go for the 505. Why? Well, it has the 12" display which is much easier to look at, it has a larger keyboard, it comes with a floppy disk drive, built in NIC, it has a port replicator. The only extra piece of equipment that you need to buy is a CDROM drive. And all this will only cost you roughly .5LBS more of weight, plus if I’m not mistaken, the Z505JS actually has a 650 MHz processor. Don't get me wrong, the SR7K is a great notebook, but in the end it's not the best "bang for the buck", plus with the 505 much less extra stuff to carry around. So let's see the estimated final costs for each notebook:
SR7K:3080 (notebook, floppy, cdrom, network card, USB HUB)
Z505JS:3300 (notebook, cdrom)
Sorry if it seems like I am pitching the 505 notebook, but I feel I wouldn't be doing anyone any good if I told them not to buy something and gave nothing as an option to get instead.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
Skyleth
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Reviews written: 14
Trusted by: 4 members
About Me:
Technology developer at a small dot com.
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