Is this a good deal? Sony FW140

http://www.bestbuy.ca/catalog/proddetail.asp?logon=&langid=EN&sku_id=0926INGFS10108934&catid=26955#

$999.99, down from $1099.99

Is this a good computer, and is it worth the moolah?

Any opinions are appreciated

Thanks

 

That was exactly the same FW I've been looking at. Good to see Best Buy has it on sale. Might actually pick it up.

As far as I'm concerned, the price is low for what's offered and what you get. I heard the FW is a solid laptop and the FW140 has decent specs to handle today's workload.

 

I bought the same laptop for $999 from sonystyle.ca and I'm EXTREMELY happy with it. I just got it today and I'm so glad I waited for this laptop. It's very well built and has a nice screen and offers great performance. The only downsides I can see with it are the oddly placed usb ports and the keyboard needs some getting used to other than it's incredible.

 

Yeah, I question their placement as well.

 

I bought the FW140D series laptop last night for $999 on sale, and I returned it to the store this morning. Here is why:

- The speakers are terrible. They don't get very loud, and the quality is very poor. It almost has a muffled sound. It's the quality you'd see at the dollar store really. There is nearly no bass. They have put in a this dolby surround sound software, and put the bass to the max, and you can hardly hear it. I have an old compaq presario that has 10 times better sound quality that this. So if you care about sound, forget the FW140D series.

- The DVD drive is one of the worst I've seen. First of all, you try to play a DVD, and you hear this chirping/whistling sound. Thanks to the terrible speakers that don't get too loud, the noise from the DVD drive is very audible, and is very distracting when watching the movie. The eject button on the DVD is terrible; you have to press it super-hard to get it to eject, unless you click eject from windows. I won't be surprised if the eject button breaks after a bit of use. I originally thought it's not working, but then reallized you have to press it very hard to get it to eject. When you turn it on, the DVD makes 2 intermitant griding noises, I have no clue what that is, because the dvd drive is empty and it does that.

- The fan goes on frequently. It's amazing how fequently. It's like you're just logged in, and hardly doing anything, maybe clicking on the start button, and every minute the fan goes on. The fan is very audible, very poor quality for a laptop of this price and brand.

- The touchpad gets very warm! So, if you use the touchpad frequently like I do, get ready for a very warm finger experience. Very distracting. And this is not even under any sort of load.

- The picture on the LCD looks washed off. Try watching a movie that is actually representing a color black, but it'll show it to you as a washed off dark grey. Tilt the screen a little vertically down or up, and the picture almost because unrecognizeable. I have see better vertical viewing angles on much cheaper and older laptops. The LCD is glossy; if you're not used to this , get ready to have to adjust the monitor until you get it just right that the reflection from the lights in the room don't block the screen. I noticed the actual LCD has not been placed in the center. It was slightly tilted clockwise. On the top edge, there was some gap, and on the button, the pixels would go underneath the bezel!

- The palmrest area feels like a cheap plastic toy from McDonalds, that you press with your pinky, and it goes down. It doesn't feel sturdy at all. The color of it is silver over there, and I wouldn't be surprised if I see dirt marks where the hands sit on it.

- The buttons near the touchpads are really flimsy. When you press them, it feels like portions of it are weaker than the rest. I have seen this sort of thing on very poor quality old acers where they 99% of the time break. Oh, and you might be in store for some bubble marks thanks to the cheap plastic they have used on the buttons.

- Unfortunately in Canada we only get the FW140D series that has canadian bilingual keyboard! What a horrible design, for those that just want to use a standard keyboard. The Enter key is farther from the right hand, and the poor right-hand pinky has to stretch very far to get to it. In fact for me at least, I had to raise my right hand and drag it over to the Enter key so I can reach it. On the standard keyboard, it doesn't take so much effort to press ENTER. The've done this to add a duplicate accent key before you go to the ENTER key as you go right. This means you accidently press the accent key as you type. I don't know about others, but I use the left SHIFT key, and on the terrible canadian bilingual keyboard, the left shift key is split into an accent key and further to its left a mini shift key. Again, this means you accidently press the other accent key, and that both pinky fingers have to reach far to get to their destination (left shift key and the enter button on the right).

- ok this might be no biggy, but I went into youtube and put it to fullscreen. It didn't show anything; instead it only showed me a square, with a diagonal line from the top right to the buttom left, the top being black, the bottom being white (or vice versa). That really sucks. Maybe it's a configurable option, but it shouldn't do that by default.

- Although it has 256 MB of dedicated graphic, I hardly saw any improvement in watching a dvd. This is a below average card. I have seen better integrated graphics than what's in this.

Anyway, I only spent an hour with this laptop, before I packed it up and this morning I returned it and got my money back.


I would have expected a much better quality from Sony. This laptop was completely useless, and absolutely not worth the 999 sale price. If this goes on sale even at 300 bucks I wouldn't get it.

 

where did you buy the laptop from? best buy?

the model you had was with an eco screen which is not that great, some of the things you mentioned othrs have as well, while others have no problems and haven't mentioned any of the problems you mentioned.

 

Generally speaking, the Sony FW series is a dissapointment. It has so many small issues that are a pain in the neck. I would expect much more from Sony.

 

Playing a DVD is not a real test for a Videocard. Any laptop can do that.

The HD3470 in FW may not be the most powerful but is much stronger than integrated GPUs.

 

Don't the new centrino2's have HD decoding in them?

 

HD decoding is in the X4500 Intel IGP. But I expect HD3470 will do it better.

(In the post above I was talking about DVD not Bluray.)

 

The HD3470 is pathetic for a 16.4" notebook. Why even bother mentioning integrated GPUs. The GPU on the FW series notebooks should have been a HD3650 at the very least.

Okay, so Sony doesn't focus on putting powerful graphics cards in its notebooks.

However, it is a premium brand. HP's notebooks offer better GPUs than Sony does and at a cheaper price too. The only reason I don't bother getting the HP is because I like Sony's notebook designs too much.

Not everyone wants a PS3 you know...

 

Many people don't care about playing heavy games on their laptop. For those people the HD3470 is fine.

And if you really want a HD3650 in your FW order it from Germany.

 

Cossack, you're in the US right? Ordering from Germany wouldn't be such a good idea. The noebook there would be much more expensive and the whole process would be too much of a hassle. If you like this notebook, order it. If not, there's a notebook out there for everyone.

 

Looks and stylewise, for sure, FW140D gets flying marks there. If only it worked as well as it looked, it would have been great. But after this bad experience, my next laptop will not be Sony. I'm looking into HPs now; they "seem" to be pretty well built, but I guess I won't know until I buy it and try it out. Sony shouldn't put out a poor product quality out there, it'll destroy their image as being a dependable brand.

 

Does anybody know if there are more defects in the best buy models compared to the ones online at sonystyle since BB stacked the very first of this models?

 

That was my thought as well, could the problems be in the BB models and other retailers and not from sony itself?

 

exactly, these we're the first models out, so they can be more prone to problems, but it's only speculation, for now. If it's false, still a sweet deal, especially with the 60$ printer. This is why I will take this day to decide if to cancel my order that was supposed to ship friday...but due to an error, only tuesday and without the printer. And by the way, best buy has no restocking fee, go watch there site.

 

I also took the plunge and bought the $999.99 FW140D model from Best Buy and I honestly can barely find anything wrong with it.

Like I said in another thread, the only "problems" is that the CD/DVD tray is a bit wobbly and the trackpad buttons are slightly loose but there were no weird noises coming out of the DVD tray (burned the 2 recovery DVDs).

The laptop is also extremely silent. At one point, I was copying stuff from an external HDD, doing Windows Update, watching a live stream of Olympics, chatting on MSN, surfing on Firefox, plus many more windows open. The laptop still managed to work flawlessly and was extremely quiet. I could only hear the fan when putting my ear right up against the side. Note that if I attempted something like this on my other laptop, the video stream would lag and probably the whole machine would just lock up until it finished its copying and updates.

The touchpaid and palmrest area are slightly warm but not uncomfortably warm. I mean you can rest your hand on it without bugging you.

Vista has also been surprisingly stable and no matter what I threw at it, it still ran without problems. The only "problem" was when Office 2007 SP1 failed to install the first time but worked the second time.

Wireless is also fast and doesn't drop the connection. I was kind of worried since technically the laptop doesn't have "Centrino 2 Inside" but the Atheros card has been running without problems.

Speakers sound decent for laptop speakers. I rarely use them so their quality barely affects me. I usually use external speakers or headphones.

I still haven't tried games on it. I will soon and let you know how it performs in that department. I also haven't tested the battery since I've been mostly plugged in.

I was thinking of returning it due the wobbly DVD tray and loose trackpad buttons but seeing that so many people received mellow FWs, I changed my mind and since everything works without problems, I think we have a keeper. I will further do testing since I have 14 days to decide whether it's good or not.

EDIT: What's also weird is that I also never experienced the YouTube fullscreen issue either. The videos play perfectly, albeit crappy quality but that's a different story.

 

I got mine from BestBuy. It was for $999 on sale. You get the same deal if you buy it on the sonystyle website, and use the ecoupon VGNDCT100 to get the price down from 1099 to 999.


I have an old compaq presario R3000 on it, and I tested the sound quality and DVD noise side by side. The sony was clearly inferior to the old compaq presario.

 

This is sad to hear but I cannot relate to most of the issues you have with your fw. The screen looks washed out because you probably got the eco screen. The youtube issue can be fixed in less than 5 seconds. When I received my fw, it had hi-color bluray and everything, I was WOWed

 

Whats the difference between this and FW 139 E/H???

 

My thoughts exactly.

 

The 139E/H has Atheros wireless and Ati HD3470 GPU.

The 140 has Intel wireless and Intel 4500mhd integrated graphics.

 

We just bought one last night as well. The FW140D and so far so good for the price.

 

I also purchased the Sony FW-140D from BestBuy in Kanata for $999.99 plus a 3-year warranty for $319.99, for a total, including tax, of $1491.58. I really wanted to like this laptop but I returned it within a week.

The first issue was that it couldn't find my wireless network, after changing a number of settings and restarting it eventually worked but I still noted intermittent issues with it dropping the connection and not finding the wireless network (I was only about 10-feet away from the router). The next issue was it wouldn't allow Windows to update itself, again after changing a few settings and restarting I got it to work. I've bought two laptops in the past 3 years (a Dell 1520 and an HP dv6500) and I never had any of these issues (and still don't). Not a good start.

Then I tried playing a DVD and was not impressed at all with the overall picture and audio quality, the video details were fine but I found the picture grainy and the blacks not really black.

In the end I decided to return it to BestBuy. I've now decided that I will probably order an Asus M50VM-A1 next week; it comes with a P8400, 4MB RAM, 1440x900 WXGA+ screen, 9600M GS/1MB graphics card, and a 2-year warranty (including 1 year of accidental damage) for $1400 including taxes.

 

and the processor.. 139 has core 2 duo 140 has centrino duo

i bought 139 yesterday and the price is 1051.99 tax included

 

Nope, same processor. Centrino 2 technology refers to a combination of Intel technologies, not just a processor. In the case of the 139E, they can't refer to it as "Centrino 2 " just because it has an Atheros wifi chipset, instead of the Intel 5100.

 

worth the price though. big diff on graphics.

 

I recently bought the 140D at Best Buy as well. Not a bad notebook. I don't like the keyboard as one user mentioned about having to stretch on the canadian keyboard for the enter key and the left shift key. It's hard to get use to. I'm still experimenting with this notebook though.

 

Definitely!

 

how do i fix the youtube problem, thanks

 

bmashh,
I had same problem with FW runnimg Firefox. Try right clicking on the image, then upgrade Adobe Media Player to current version 9.0.124. Hope it helps.

 

thanks so much man, it worked.