Do you really get what you paid for?
Written: Apr 03 '01
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Pros: Readily avaliable, cheap for features
Cons: Poor quality parts, short warrenty, bad support
The Bottom Line: Easy to get, perceived value for money, but the support you get for these laptops would cripple you when it breaks. Overall shoddy construction
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| MooRogue's Full Review: Sony VAIO F590 PC Notebook |
The Sony VAIO series of laptops can be found at just about any decent electronics store, Circuit City, Best Buy, Fry's Electronics... They are usually in stock, and come out with pretty regular updates to their models, though in general the hardware tends to stay pretty consistant.
A few of the good points for the Sony F-series is that:
- It's cheap compared to other brands with the same features
- It has lots of features like DVD player, "i.Link" connector, TV out, and a big LCD screen
- It's readily available. Just pick it up from a local store, no need to wait for the manufacturer to build, or send it to you.
Now for the bad parts. I maintain approximately 20 of these Sony F-series laptops for my company. All of these laptops are less then a year old. So far, I have seen:
- 3 broken keyboards
- 4 broken LCD latches
- 1 hard disk failure
- 3 modem failures
Now I would consider this to be somewhat atypical of wear & tear for a business laptop. Compared to our previous series of Dell Latitides, this is appalling. The Sony VAIOs were replacements for Dell Latitides, which functioned without problems for 3-4 years before being phased out. Personally, I also own an IBM Thinkpad that has gone for 3 years without any failures.
Now for Sony Support. Their tech support is prety helpful and polite, though it did take me a while to get through to their hotline. The issues I have with Sony's support is:
1. Warrenty period and restrictions
2. Actual support provided
1. Warrenty period and restictions
When you purchase a Sony VAIO laptop, you will only get one year manufacturer warrenty. Compared to Dell's 3 year on-site warrenty, this isn't very good. In addition, Sony has a restriction stating that if the laptop is not registered with Sony within 90 days of purchase, you forfeit the rest of your warrenty period. For any corporation that has to deal with multiple systems, this becomes a big hassle as you have to explicity opt-out of all the spam and marketing information that Sony wants to send you. I've talked to Sony Support about this policy, but the only thing they can tell me is to write a letter to complain to Sony's President
2. Now for the actual support provided. Sony requires that you send in your system to them for maintanance, and that you pay for shipping to and from their support site. The estimates of repair time vary depending on what is being repaired, but this would mean that your system would be out of service for about 2-3 weeks, including shipping time. For anyone who depends on their laptop to work, this would be unacceptable. For comparison, Dell and Compaq will send a technician to your location by the next business day to perform repairs on-site, keeping your downtime to a minimum, while IBM will send you an empty box via Airborne Express to send your laptop in for repairs, and return your laptop to you via the same overnight service for free, and minimizing your downtime to just 2 days.
I'm hoping that Sony's FX series will have a higher quality then the F-series, but I'm not very hopeful of their support policies and quality.
Overall, the Sony VAIO series is probably a good choice for any home user who doesn't depend on it for critical services, but for any company, the support for this laptop makes it unacceptable
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 2899
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 601-700
Screen Size: 15
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
MooRogue
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Location: SF Bay Area, California
Reviews written: 17
Trusted by: 4 members
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