One Year With an SZ

Last Saturday marked a year with my SZ330. In that time I have run XP, Ubuntu Linux and Vista. Much to my surprise a clean install of Vista seems to work the best and Linux the worst. Right now the machine is Vista Business and that's it.

The factory install of XP lasted about 48 hours and was replaced with a semi-clean restore. That turned out to be the most stable XP installation for me, and I used it for 5 months before trying Vista. A true clean XP install was not any better. The power management software is seriously flawed in that much functionality is lost unless you run in an administrative account. That is what most people do, and that is why there is so much malware out there.

When it first came out I thought Vista was so bad I would remove it after a day or so. Updated drivers, bios and hotfixes made a difference. The performance and reliability hotfixes released in August finally took Vista over the top.

In a year there was one hardware problem, my display had a white line across it. Sony fixed it under warranty and I have no complaints about the service.

I am sort of amazed at the short life of some of the models. Although the SZ330 was for sale on the Sony site only a month or two ago. It must have been rather frustrating to buy an SZ4xx in February judging from my experience with Vista at that time, and the large number of software updates Sony issued for those models.

In retrospect, I did not need such a fancy notebook computer, although I do enjoy the good performance, small size, light weight, construction and relatively good battery life. The Cingular WAN has never been used. Dual video is cool, but hardly necessary. I could easily live with the new Intel video chip and skip Nvidia altogether. Mac's are rather cool, and I may get one next time, especially if their market share continues to grow. However, unless there is a disaster, next time is about 2 years away.

 

Appreciate your reflections on the last year with your laptop.

Have an SZ680 -- 1 month old -- already had it serviced onsite for LCD banding and am impressed with the service

I agree that the dual video is a little bit of a stretch -- esp since it requires a conscious decision before boot, or a reboot to enact -- if they were able to do it after booting it would be much more useful (it would essentially be another power saving feature like speedstep)

At the moment I only wish I had spent the extra $50 to upgrade from a t7300 to a t7500 (esp since my current mission is to play hd dvd's through an external hd dvd drive, and my t7300 is barely squeaking by)

 

Is there any chance that the data transmission rate from the external drive is the problem, rather than processor speed?

 

Thank you Leadweight.

Really nice to hear about your experience with SZ because I bought a SZ650 a week ago and I wad kinda concerned with durability. I've been used to a sturdy laptop and this one seems vry fragile to me.

Anyway wonderful post.

Cheers,

MiMiX

 

Hmm ... I don't think so -- I'm using the xbox 360 hd dvd drive which has been shown to work through the usb 2.0 port perfectly fine on PCs -- unless the sz6 series has a crippled usb port?

On second though -- maybe there is some issue with the bus speed on the USB 2.0 ports -- is there any way to test this?
My external drive that is hooked up to the usb 2.0 has issues playing video off of it and it is 7200rpm 400gb drive (so it should be pretty fast)

 

The SZ650 is a really nice computer, IMO.

 

1 yr later: keyboard is very, very mushy.
LCD has those little candles at the bottom (LED lights) with alternating dark/light spots on lower brightness levels.

Other than that and the usual battery life halving, it is fine. But it doesn't age well overall compared to the notebooks that I've owned before....I have the sz270p