Sony VAIO VGN-TZ1Brand: Sony
Binding: Personal Computers
Poorly made, bad service, and a ton of adware! [Posted on 2007-09-27]
I bought this machine from Sony back in August. It took me three days of sweat and tears to get all of the adware off of the machine's tiny hard drive. In addition, the battery never seated firmly and always wiggled around a lot. I wrote Sony service about that and they told me it was "normal." Then, the second time I took the laptop out of the house, one end of the battery fell out. It's held in my a tiny plastic prong, which evidently broke off under the severe stress of being in a padded laptop sleeve inside a padded laptop bag. My service options? Send the computer to them for service (minimum turnaround: 2 weeks), or buy a new battery myself. Can they reimburse me if I send in the defective battery? No. Can they reimburse me if they later figure out this is a widespread problem and recall the battery? No. The service rep actually suggested that I could just use the computer without the battery--not so I could send the battery in for Sony to examine and replace, but just, you know, permanently. This is the last time I am ever buying any product from Sony.
Despite popular belief this subnotebook is best ever.. [Posted on 2007-10-12]
First of all I was really skeptical on this model, especially when I had just bought the cheaper version TZ150 with 1.06Ghz Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM and 100GB 4200rpm HDD. I used the TZ150 for approximately 2h trying to remove all the bloatware that Sony decided to install (apparently an issue with all US/NA Sony laptops) and at the end gave up.. Way too slow, to the point it was unusable. Took it back to BestBuy got charged 15% restocking fee and after reading lots of reviews online I decided to order the faster brother TZ190N..
Let me start by saying the 32GB SSD has 0.3ms access time, making it BLAZING fast.. Adobe Photoshop CS3 opens up in 5 seconds flat, Microsoft office 2007 is as fast as on my quad-core desktop and in general the performance boost from the faster processor, faster SSD and 2GB RAM make it amazingly fast and usable..
I recommend doing a clean Vista install to lose all the sony bloatware and install the drivers from Sony's site. Granted you'll waste an evening doing that, but your laptop & yourself will thank you..
Amazing battery life, love the keyboard and the screen is gorgeous. I could do with larger SSD but remember this is NOT a desktop replacement and SSD prices are skyrocket high. I'm very very pleased and if I had to chose I'd buy it again!!
Small, Beautiful, Almost Perfect [Posted on 2007-10-17]
When you buy a Sony laptop, think two things: Beautiful and expensive. This machine delivers both.
When I first opened the small box, I couldn't help but be impressed by the complete miniturization of everything, including the AC adaptor (thanks Sony!). Even though the keyboard is smaller, I found it comfortable to type on, similar to a Macbook. The screen is gorgeous! This laptop is quiet, thanks to an SSD 32 GB "hard diskless" configuration. This laptop does not generate anywhere the amount of heat I have forcibly had to get used to. It gets warm, but not hot.
There's always a negative with laptops, and with this machine it's disk space. I'm telling you, they couldn't fit another third party trial application on this machine. Sony exec are whores. Beautiful and expensive whores, but whores nonetheless. I'm pretty sure I could get my application bundled into the next Vaio if I tried hard enough. Anyway, back to the facts. Start with a 32 GB SSD, which is really 30.7 in real life (nasty little Gigabyte to Megabyte to byte conversion - - - 1024 bytes vs. 1MB - - so you lose 24 bytes per MB in real life). OK, so take off 8 GB off the 30.7 because they don't include recovery disks, they created a "recovery partition" on the laptop itself, so you're down to say 22 GB. Vista is a hog, and so MS Office 2007, and so is the biometric fingerprint reader software and so is the adware, the trialware, the multimedia software, the Click to CD software, etc, etc, etc .....
Whew... You're left with about 8 GB of hard drive space ... I don't know about you and your usage, but 8 GB (to start out with!) is practically nothing. This does not work for me. Maybe it will for you, but not me. So what do you do ...........
Downgrade your new Vaio to Windows XP. Ouch! The Vista screen is so nice and beatiful though. Isn't this what we paid for? No. We paid to have a small fast beautiful machine. And unfortunately, Vista is just not ready for primetime, therefore, the best move you can make is to go to NotebookReview.com forums reading up and spend a day downgrading your system. Afterwards, everything (well, mostly everything) will work as before, and instead of running into deadends trying to get your old applications to work with Vista, you'll be with using tried and true, XP, and you'll have 20 GB of space instead of 8 GB. ** Caution ** - - - remember to create Recovery Disks beforehand (it's easy and takes 2 DVDs).
In conclusion, this machine is sweet, and if you can be happy with not a lotta storage or you can make it through a downgrade, you will love this laptop.
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