As the title says, I'm less than impressed with my FS-215S. My problem is this; apart from the excellent screen (best I have seen on a non mac notebook) and the nice styling, this is possibly the worst notebook computer I have owned.
Where to start? Well I thought I had done my homework on this one, I really did. Most of the reviews I read gave this machine a good rating with the caveats that the perhaps the HD could have been faster and that the battery life was average at best. I bought an FS knowing this and accepting it as a price I was prepared to pay for the screen (I wanted to be able to accurately edit photos whilst away from my main desktop machine) what I was not prepared for was the slew of problems that I have had with this machine since I bought it last August.
Since then we have had;
1. Wireless networking problems.
When the notebook is running on battery power it keeps dropping the network connection (although the signal strength/data rate appears OK in the system tray) forcing me to "repair" every few minutes and as such renders the machine virtually unusable for all intents and purposes on my home wireless LAN whilst using the battery. Oddly this issue fixes itself when the note book is on AC power. At first I thought it might be a problem with my wireless router, but no other computers that I have tested on the network suffer from this problem. In addition, I have experienced this fault on several other wireless networks when using my vaio. All this would seem to point to a problem with the wireless adapter (or at the very least the drivers) used in this notebook.
2. Slow boot times.
On a number of occasions my vaio has developed a fault where it seems to take forever to boot. The windows XP loading screen comes up and the progress bar crawls across the screen for about 8-10 mins. Eventually the desktop appears, but without any icons and then sits for another 2-3 mins before everything appears to have loaded correctly. Even at this point, any programmes run at a snails pace and I can clearly see that the mouse pointer "stutters" across the screen as if the processor is under heavy load, even if no applications are open. At first I thought that I might have picked up a virus or other nasty as there seemed to be a lot of HD activity even when idle, but scanning with Norton, Ad-aware, spybot, etc found nothing. I even tried Rootkit Revealer and Blacklight in case it was something more serious, but still found nothing. The first time that this happened, I found that restoring to the previous day's configuration fixed the issue. The next time it happened the most recent restore point failed to restore properly, forcing me to work back though the system check points until I eventually found one from 2 months previously that worked. This however "broke" several applications that then had to be installed from scratch. Currently the notebook is OK if a little slow, but I fear that I will see this issue again...
3. DVD/CD drive issues.
For the last 3 months, the DVD drive had been a bit "odd" sometimes, but nothing that couldn't be lived with. In the last 2 weeks it has become an issue that can't be ignored. It will refuse to read some disks, everything from CD-Rs through to "pressed" retail DVDs. Sometimes I get told "no disk in drive" on other occasions I am left to deduce that something is wrong from the "whirr, bzzert...CRUNCH!" sound that repeats over and over from the drive until I give up and press cancel. This came to a head last night when I tried to burn a set of recovery disks (2 DVDs). First of all I kept getting either "No disk in drive" or "disk type not recognised" messages, which forced me to try about 7 different blank DVDs (from 2 manufacturers) until I managed to get it start burning. When it did start burning the "Time left to go" started at about 3 mins and climbed up to 5, 10, 30... Eventually settling at about 65mins. 65 mins !!! even if it is having to uncompess the data from the recovery partition on the fly (which, judging by the size of the partition versus the capacity of 2 DVDs, I don't think that it is) that's still crazy. Seeing as it was 11:40pm, I decided that I really didn't have the patience to sit and nursemaid the thing into the small hours, so I cancelled the burn.
Last night I tried to get onto the vaio online support site, but it appeared to be down. Next stop was this forum, somewhere I had not yet been. What I read in the first 10mins made me feel sick. The number of people who seem to be suffering from exactly the same problems as me, with both FS series and other vaios is quite.... scary.
Where do I go from here? My vaio was bought in August, so I assume will still be under warranty, but to be honest, from reading the comments on this forum, I don't hold out much hope of Sony helping much.
Apologies for the length of this, my first post, but I really just had to get all of that off my chest!
Left thinking I should have spent that extra £500 and got a Mac Powerbook G4...
Charlie.
