I purchased a Sony VAIO laptop (VGN-SZ56GN) sometime back. December 2007 to be precise. I slapped in an extra 2 GB of RAM along with the defalut config. Couldn’t get my machine to utilise 4 Gigs of it and had to settle to 3 GB. The whole thing cost me 1,10,000INR. Did I blow too much on just a piece metal and silicon? No, I just wanted to feel rich and, that was totally worth every single buck.
Now, after almost 6 months of use, How good did my purchase turn out to be?
Here goes…
Good Stuff:
- Display is very crisp and looks beautiful.
- At 1.93 Kgs, the laptop is light and makes some other laptops look like breifcases.
- The free, extra 2 years international warranty is welcome for a laptop of this cost.
- You can run the laptop in two “Stamina” and “Speed” modes. Really nice if you want to save some juice.
- I can play Crysis (Albeit, at a low fps). That should suffice my gaming needs.
- The keyboard which uses the entire length of the laptop making it very comfortable for typing.
- Trackpad is responsive and smooth.
- Some nifty software is bundled with the laptop.
Bad Stuff:
- Battery life is pathetic, and even more so if you’re running in “Speed” mode.
- Built-in speakers aren’t that great but, that’s not much of a problem if you got some other speakers.
- Just two USB ports isn’t good enough for me.
- Comes preloaded with Windows Vista. More on that below.
So, why is preloading Vista a bad thing?
For one thing, I had purchased a copy of XP just before I bought the laptop. Talk about bad timing. And for other, If I try to dual boot Linux alongside Vista, my network connection starts acting up. The wireless router I use to connect to the internet keeps getting rebooted when I am using Vista. This doesn’t happen when I use Linux with XP. If I wipe out the Linux installation things start working fine again. Weird, huh!. Tell you what? It frustrates me not being able to run whatever I want on my laptop.
I need to find out why this is happening only when I run Vista with Linux. And, let me tell you Sony Customer Care wasn’t much helpful.
For now, I’m running Vista alone, since I don’t really need Linux except for satisfying my geek fantasies. 
