Sony VAIO FXA53 Laptop (1.3 GHz Athlon XP1500+, 256 MB SDRAM, 30 GB hard drive)Platform: Windows XP Home Edition
Brand: Sony
Binding: Personal Computers
Keep looking, over priced and out of date [Posted on 2002-12-28]
This notebook is out of date and is way out classed by rivals in the same price range. What I don't like:
SDRAM? Most notebooks in this price range offer DDR-SDRAM. DDR transmits twice the data with each clock, making it much faster. SDRAM has been abandoned. 1.3 GHz Athlons: They run hot and lack SSE-2. SSE-2 is a feature built into current Intel and future AMD CPUs. If you don't have it, software that uses it will run slower. This includes major products like Windows, Adobe, and many games. ATI RAGE MOILITY graphics chipset? Very old news with almost no 3D features. Notebooks that cost 30% less are at least offering the ATI Radeon M6-P or even ATI 7500 chipsets. If this notebook was half the price I could endorse it. At this price it is highway robbery. Either look at Toshiba, HP, Gateway or Dell, or move up the Sony price range into one of their newer P4 based notebooks. I'm sure this left over is about to be discontinued.
good all around laptop, great for digital video capture [Posted on 2003-04-26]
I have had this laptop for about 10 months now. It's very heavy when you add the second battery. I have gone to a rolling laptop case for travel as my shoulder couldn't take the weight. I added third party memory to bring it up to 512MB, I'm on my third module. I think the heat killed the others. Luckily I bought the lifetime warrenty, so it's all been free replacements. I recommend a laptop cooler as it gets very hot. I have been using it to capture minidv from my dvcamcorder. I scan tape and capture unattended. It works flawlessly. For this use I highly recommend this laptop. Overall, I like the computer, only draw backs are weight, and slow performance compared to other laptops I have used in the same class.
worst laptop I've owned [Posted on 2004-04-15]
I've had this notebook computer for just under 2 years and in that time it has been nothing but problems. It constantly locks up and runs much hotter than any other laptop I've ever had. It has crappy speakers,it's sound is intermittent and the restore function does not always work. I've had to reformat the hard drive 9 times since owning it and now the monitor no longer works. Sony charges insane prices for it's repair as well as it's accesories. I've always used it as more of a desktop so hooking it up to an external monitor is an acceptable although irritating solution for the monitor problem. It won't however change the fact that this is a lousy piece of machinery.
3 years - still going strong. Great laptop! [Posted on 2005-05-26]
I've had this laptop for 3 years now. I paid about $1400 for it. It performs really great. It outperforms my friend's Dell Inspiron 1.6GHz Pentium 4 (same RAM) everytime we run benchmarking software on both computers (and he paid $2300 for his Dell!). Even by looking at it, you can see the same exact programs open much faster on mine, even when both of us close all the crap programs running in the background.
This computer also runs very quite - since the processor is 1.3Ghz it needs smaller (quiter) fans.
ABOUT THE HEAT:
Yes the AMD Athlon 1.3Ghz does run hotter than a 1.3Ghz Pentium 4 BUT it performs much better. There is a reason why they call it "AMD Athlon XP 1500+" and it really runs that well (even better than my friend's P4 1.6, as I've mentioned above). So if you want to compare it to a Pentium, compare it to a 1.5Ghz Pentium or 1.6Ghz - in both cases the Athlon is better. Also, I've seen people stick pencils and pens under their laptops (to lift them higher and help with cooling - they overheated) running Celerons, even when having the laptop on a flat table - I've never had to do that, even when I have it on my couch or my lap. So, in my opinion, the heat is not really a problem with this laptop.
For all the ports and drives it has (floppy, serial, paralell, VGA, and the usual rest) it is very compact and light. It is way lighter and slimmer than my friend's Dell. The battery used to last me over 3 hours (easy), but now since it's 3 years old it lasts much shorter.
The Display is absolutely awesome - just like all Sony displays.
MY ONLY COMPLAINT:
-more video memory: 8MB is a joke, unless you don't plan on playing any games, exept for some basic ones. Just for comparison, "Counter Strike" ran fine on it, but "Command & Conquer: Generals" won't.
So far this laptop has been good to me and it still performs really really well. I keep it free from viruses and defrag the hard drive ocasionaly, and I am (and many of my friends are) really surprised how well it performs.
If SONY keeps on making these computers this well in the future, my next laptop will definitely be a VAIO!
Don't waste your money [Posted on 2005-10-05]
This is the worst computer I have ever had! Had problems from the start! Would constantly over-heat with very little use. Sound never worked properly, very choppy. On month 13, the screen died out. Customer care was a joke! They wanted me to pay to ship it to Kentucky and then pay for them to diagnose the problem and THEN pay for them to fix the problem and pay to ship it back to me. I was told a replacement screen would run upwards of $600. It's been sitting useless since. I will NEVER buy a sony product ever again and strongly warn against buying this notebook.
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