Question to all Past Sony owners.

I've never owned a Sony laptop but i'm considering the Sony SZ.

How long has your Sony lasted before you started to experience problems?

people have been telling me that they dont last long and normally something will go wrong after the 1st year of warranty.

What's your thoughts on this?

EDIT: I have voted never as i've not got one, so please minus one vote for never.

 

I had my previous SOny for 4 years. One hinge cracked and a dead HD after 3 years.....but that was because airport security dropped it on a marble floor. No probs otherwise.

Keep in mind alot of things could have happened the last 4 years. Like built quality of Sony is changing or sometihng

 

Never had one of their laptops but my md has lasted 4 years so far, our family TV has lasted 18 years so far, My vcr is 5 years, dvd 3 years and my sound system 2 years oh my cd player is about 9 years old and still works fine. Sony do a pretty great job in my opinion considering our teac and akai tv's never lasted more than a year.

 

I have a VAIO TR1 with 0 problems after 2.5 years...

 

I have had a sony for 3 years (still have it)

it has worked flawlessly for me so far never needed to call the tech support.
Though its AC Adapter broke (aka the wire wouldnt work with the adapter anymore) so I bought a new adapter. Then I got a HP (see my sig). Now im getting a Sony FE series.

 

I have had my Sony FR130 for 3 years now. After 2 years the HD went, the CD/DVD rom drive went, the touchpad stopped working , some of the keys on the keyboard stopped working, and the input port where I plug in the AC adapter broke, and the battery couldn't keep a charge. Luckily I had a 3 year contract with Best Buy and they fixed everything no problem. Didn't have to lay out a cent and got all new parts. I still love my Sony and am now ordering an FE590.

 

*reads markeyp's post*

i pray that won't happen to my sz [hasn't come yet]

 

I reckon i might take the 3 yr care plan out. Just to be safe

 

My old Sony Viao never had a thing wrong with it. My sister has it now, and still no problems and it is like 4-5 years old.

 

It seems that the old ones are nuclear proof!

People have questioned the quality of the latest Vaio range.

 

I think they are just being overly critical. Every notebook has flaws. Like I said, only time will tell, but the insides looked pretty good on the FE.

 

I have had a Sony Vaio LSK-Z505 for four and a half years. It's been a workhorse. It's been dropped, hard, multiple times. I've had to pull the keyboard out, remove every key to get cat hair out, and put it all back together, and the keyboard still works great.

In the time I've had it, it's chowed it's way through 3 long-life batteries -- I work primarily on battery power, and I used it every single day I had it. More recently, I've found I can no longer install new Windows Updates without a conflict with the wireless card I'm using that causes a bluescreen. And, finally, in the last few weeks, the power cable is no longer talking to the battery/laptop correctly.

That last problem is what caused me to go out and finally spring for an SZ120 this week. I admit, a good deal of the decision was based on just how indestructible the Z505 has been. It's an interesting change -- I'm still withholding final judgment on the SZ120, but I'm cautiously happy with it, at the moment. It does, however, appear to be a bit more fragile that my old Z505, so I'm trying to remind myself that not all laptops can be treated the way that one was.

 

I've owned a SONY VAIO PCG GRX570 for 4 years without a hitch, not even the blue screen of death has occurred. But recently it suffered well known problems with the RAM slots and to fix the problem I removed the RAM chip from the faulty slot. It now runs on 256M instead of 512M of RAM. The stock 40G hard drive was replaced with a Toshiba 60G having more cache(?). The unit seems to run just as fast as before and hasn't seemed to suffer any performance problems as a result of the repair.

AND TO THIS DAY THE DISPLAY IS STILL ONE OF THE BEST DISPLAYS I'VE EVER SEEN!

 

sony 505 (oldest model...), never been fallen. Main board fail in the`20th month.

sony C1 (10.6" &.99kg) fell on floor a few times while unit was runing,
never has a problem up to this moment (43 months).

sony sz premium (now) so far so good!

 

My sister has my old 505 and it is starting to show some signs of aging after 3 years. She's preparing to retire it and move on....

My Z1VA lasted 2 years and the motherboard gave out right before the CC warranty ended...Lucky right??!? So they gave me a gift card (worth 1369.00) and led me to my current vaio laptop (sz120). The Z1VA was sent in twice for motherboard probs....fixed the first time...unfixable the 2nd. Although it sucked to to have my computer basically die, the circumstances and timing couldn't have been better!!! I'm happy!

So I hope I can get a few years from my SZ before moving on to even brighter pastures....

 

I haven't had a Sony notebook before, but generally I've had mixed experience with their hardware. Their portable audio players (walkman and onwards) are/were notorious for having flaky headphone jacks that would die after a year or two; and working with the PS1 and PS2 for a living, I've seen the optical drives on those go bad *way* too often for it simply to be bad luck. Let's hope PS3 isn't the same, given the cost of the Blu Ray drives... On the other hand, I've used Sony TVs, VCRs and audio systems that have run for a decade or more without a single problem.

 

Me and two of my friends have had Vaio Z-series (a pair of PCG-Z1WA's and a PCG-Z1VA) for 2.5 years now with no problems at all. A couple of months ago I swapped out the factory 60Gb drive /512Mb RAM for a Hitachi 7200rpm 100Gb drive and 1 Gb of RAM, and it continues to purr.

Sunday night I did an equivalent drive swap on a PCG-Z1VA that has been under constant hard use... Half of the case screws were a little loose, but other than that it's been running like a champ too.

(And I *love* my Z1... I work in a lab where we get a huge selection of different laptop models on the market in for disassembly/competitive analysis, and nothing had caught my eye as a replacement for my Z1 until the SZ came along)