AR Questions-audio quality, drive replacement, warranty

Sony's new AR notebooks look like they'll be out soon!

-Do Sony's notebooks in general, and the AR in particular have good audio quality? Dell, and apparently even Apple have this background hiss through headphones. It's apparently do to the garbage audio chip-but it turns out Sony is using the same junk Sigmatel on the AR and other models I looked at. So presumably they have the same hiss problems?

-I asked in general before, but does the AR series have easily replaceable hard drives? I can't see any openings for the drives on the bottom of the hardware, so I'm assuming they AREN'T easily upgradeable. Sony has instructions for swapping the optical drive in this model, but not the hard drives-and those are more important to me.

-Is Sony's warranty service good? Like you call them with a hardware problem and it actually gets taken care of? I might buy an extended warranty if I got one.

-Do they ship with an HDMI-> DVI adapter, and does that really work just as well as a standard DVI port for external monitors?

Thanks!

 

i know only about hard drive replacement
there is only one screw that lock the harddrive door
and i already change the harddrives
but make sure that you make the recovery disks before you do anything
it quite an easy upgrade

now i'm running at 250*2 raid0

about the HDMI cable and HDMI->DVI adapter
sony will give you the adapter only if you buy the AR190G, AR290G, AR390E

 

Awesome! Thank you so much for that info! That makes me confident to consider the AR

So Sony dosen't ship with an OS reinstallation CD? You burn an OS disc yourself?

Did you have to activate Vista after reinstalling? On Dells the included OS disc is tied to the Dell BIOS, so it never needs to be activated. Is that the same for Sony?

Okay, but sounds like I should be able to buy a separate adapter that'll hopefully work.

 

i dont mean to sound like a jerk, but sony's customer service blows after you passed the 1yr warranty. They constantly have problems with their charging circuits and batteries. My laptop was made in japan, maybe the newer ones made in china will be better.

Again, they have some of the slickest laptops on the planet, but after my experiences and hearing about others, I dont think I'll ever buy a sony again.

 

I'd think the Japanese ones would be better, if anything

Well, thanks for the input. Consumer Reports does rand them really low for their customer service.

 

well i don't know what other ARs are from
but mine it said Made in USA with foreign components

and yes, sony doesn't give u any recover cd
you need to make the recovery discs from the recovery partition
mine come with XP. after recover it doesn't need to be activated

 

Really!?! That's amazing and cool

Well, as long as you don't need to activate it on that system, that doesn't sound too bad.

Looks like the new ARs come out on the 26th!

Wonder if Sony sells spare AC adapters for these things.