Should I get the Vaio VPCZ122GX?

Hi, I've fallen in love with Sony Vaio's. I have had my Vaio CW for over 2 years now and its still running strong.

Anyways, I've found quite the deal on craiglist. The laptop is only 3 months old so there is 7 months of warranty left and he is only asking for $1250 CDN.

I have some questions:
-Could I watch 1080p movies on this laptop?
-Does this model suffer from the battery drain problem?
-Will the palm rest start to fade in time with use?
-Other than the hinges are there any other reliability issues with this laptop?
-How bad is the internal speakers?
-My sony Vaio CW with runs the same graphics card (GT 330m) only gets an avg. of 20 FPS playing BF3 in low settings. Will BF3 gaming improve?
-After reading many reviews, the battery life seems to be a disappointment for a high-end laptop like this. Please correct me if Im wrong.

By the way, should I take this laptop to the sony store to have it verified?

Quick specs:
- Core i5 520M / 2.4 GHz ( 3.06 GHz )
- 13.1" LCD 1600x900 resolution
- 4GB RAM
- 128GB Solid State Drive
- Premium carbon fibre casing
- DVD±RW
- GF GT 330M / HD Graphics with 1GB RAM
- Gigabit Ethernet
- Bluetooth
- fingerprint reader
- Windows 7 Professional 64bit

 

-Will play 1080p flawlessly both on intel HD and nvidia.
-6h max in stamina 3,5 to 4h max on nvidia.
-It is strong but it some areas will probably get darker because of repeated hands contacts.
-I had screen issue but I was out of luck I guess. For hinges you need to be careful and open the lid gently.
-It's okay to watch a movie in a relatively silent room but it's far from being great.
-Clocks maybe be downclocked on Z, but the nvidia card has a great overclock potential resulting in 1 or 2 °C more. But I guess BF3 gaming experience won't change.
-After 1 year and half of daily use, using most of the time Sony battery care, it got damaged by 18%
- Temps get easily hots (CPU cores can reach 90°C) but I've never noticed throttling on mine.

 

what ^ said.

The palm rest does fade, but I type without resting my palm on the palm rest so i don't have to worry about fading. There's other options to prevent it, like applying a skin or some type of film.

There's a way to mod the bios and install more up to date drivers for the GT330m than the one sony provides, but i'm not sure how much fps you'll gain from it. It's a great laptop for everything else though (=

 

Is there an issue with the screen being scratched by the keyboards because the screen is so flimsy.

 

The screen on the Z2 is superb, not flimsy. The issue of scratches concerns the palmrest.

 

There's a slight issue that if your keys are dirty/dusty, you may see an outline of the keys on the screen in dust/dirt, but that's not permanent, and easily wipes away. Also, I think it's quite a common problem - I've had it on other laptops. Doesn't bother me in the slightest. You can keep something like a cloth between the keyboard and screen if it worries you.

 

^not very convenient when you have to put a cloth in every time you close your lid eh.

I'm a bit confused with the models numbers. Is the VPCZ122GX/S short named to Z1 or Z2???

 

^ As I say, it doesn't bother me. The screen is so bright you don't really notice these things, and my screen is always covered in **** anyway! The VPCZ122GX/S is a Z1.

 

Thanks for clearing that up.

Does warranty still apply to this product if i buy this 2nd hand?

 

the warranty should apply if the seller provides you with the actual invoice according to the sony limited warranty document here under term:

 

I have this laptop. It's great, but I wanna get rid of mine because I have no use for it (I use my macbook).

I treated mine with meticulous care and it's in an impeccable condition (even the palm rest is completely unfaded, but that's probably because I didn't use it much)...

-Could I watch 1080p movies on this laptop?
Yes, easily, on both Intel and Nvidia.

-Does this model suffer from the battery drain problem?
Somewhat. If you charge the battery fully on mine and check in a few days, it'll probably be at 80-90%. Not a huge deal if you use it regularly.

-Will the palm rest start to fade in time with use?
Probably with heavy use, yes. Mine's unfaded after 1.5 years, but I've used it very few times.

-Other than the hinges are there any other reliability issues with this laptop?
No issues with hinges on mine, it's perfect and I don't see them failing anytime soon (even with heavy use).

-How bad is the internal speakers?
They're not horrible. Medium quality for < 15" PC laptops.

-My sony Vaio CW with runs the same graphics card (GT 330m) only gets an avg. of 20 FPS playing BF3 in low settings. Will BF3 gaming improve?
What CPU does your CW have? But BF3 is probably more GPU-heavy so it won't make much difference.

-After reading many reviews, the battery life seems to be a disappointment for a high-end laptop like this. Please correct me if Im wrong.
When I had XP on it, I was getting 4 hours tops using low/medium brightness and surfing with Wi-Fi on, plus a little youtubing. I can see it getting 4.5-5 hours with Wi-Fi off. Around 2-3 hours when watching heavy videos or doing CPU heavy stuff. That said, battery life in Windows 7 should probably be better, but I dunno. I get about the same using Windows 8 Developer Preview right now, but I'm sure its drivers aren't optimized for power consumption.

 

Never happened with mine. But I never apply any pressure on the LCD lid when the laptop is closed (even when transporting it). Few ppl take as much care of their laptops as I, however.

 

I just bought a used vaio Z. Other than creating a recovery disc with vaio care. What should I do?

Im a bit paranoid about using passwords with it since you never know if the seller put a keylogger or something.

 

Make sure you make multiple copies of the recovery disk via vaio care and use other programs too, If you're thinking about deleting the recovery partition. I made 2 sets in vaio care and both don't work. As for the keylogger thing, i doubt the seller would do that, but if you're paranoid just backup your files and restore using the recovery disk or hitting f10 at bootup (assuming that the seller didn't delete the recovery partition)

 

Ignore post

 

check this out as well. It's a thread about tweaks for the ssd in order to prolong the life and free up some space as well. Everything is optional though, and whatever you decide to do is up to you.

 

How do I check this laptop is not a LEMON?

I DO NOT TRUST THE SELLER.

Heres my story: http://forum.notebookreview.com/off-topic/622654-am-i-being-screwed.html

 

Wow that sucks big time. I'm surprised you still bought it. It's very suspicious that someone selling a laptop worth 1000+ would be in such a rush. You can't really test if it's a lemon, you have to actually use the laptop to determine whether it is or not. As far as i know the only thing you can test is the memory by running memtest.