About to Purchase an SZ-390CTO

After talking with sony and confirming that this is indeed a customizable Premium SZ notebook I want to purhcase it with the following specs:
2.33GHZ Core 2 Duo
160 GB Hard Drive
2GB RAM
and all the other options.

I have a few questions before doing the purchase:

1)Does engraving affect the limited warranty? what if your notebook comes messed up from sony and it is engraved? You cannot return it!!!!?!?!?!

2)Will any new ULTRA Portable be available from sony anytime soon because I want Vista but feel that if I wait till December maybe SOny will release Vista on a new model? ANyone know of any rumors on any new sony laptop? Will a new SZ model come out featuring Sprint WAN?

3)Does anyone know if prices will decrease soon? And if this sony SZ-390 has LED backlight, cause on the sony site it only says that TX series has LED backlight. (Just double checking)

Besides these questions I am about to purchase this notebook.......hopefully it will give me more battery life than my previous SZ-580P, and FS500P which never yielded more than 1.5 hrs of battery life. Thanks again

 

One thing to think about is that engraving might affect the resale value of the laptop later on if you ever want to sell it.

I think there's a new TX model coming out with Spring WWAN, not sure about future plans for the SZ. It's probably a safe bet though that when Vista is released there will be the ability to get an updated SZ with Vista.

The SZ390 is part of the premium series so it should have the LED backlight as well.

I'm really surprised you only got 1.5 hours of battery like out of the S580...... my S360 always did a good job on battery life, usually in the 3 hour range.

 

I really don't know why some people are excited about Vista. It's not going to be any step forward in productivity (they haven't done something as cool as multi-tasking that they could claim with 95)... it's going to be a bigger, heavier, harder-to-run more-of-the-same operating system.

And if it's just "sexy" that you want, there are other leaner and faster options (yes, without going to linux)... that include fun things like dockers and whatever.

Especially on a notebook forum... "leaner and faster" = "more battery life".


Where's the fuss?... it's just Microsoft catching up to 2004.

 

I believe if you go to the actual CTO order page on SonyStyle.com, it will directly tell you what happens to your warranty if you get engraving. I, personally, would avoid it.