Hi all
After the two failures with the SZ2XP/C laptop.... Dabs.com happily refunded me after 4-5 months of usage of the second SZ2XP/C I had because they no longer stocked it in.
For now, I will say that Dabs had EXCELLENT support. While they only have online chat support and no phone, it was quick, easy and just brilliant.
I had left my 1gb memory stick in the laptop which they promptly sent back to me without even charging me postage!
Unfortuntly, Dabs.com still do not stock the SZ4XWN/C - most likely because they are trying to get rid of the SZ3 stock.
So I got mine from Microwarehouse who is also known as Macwarehouse and PC World Business.
Ordered at 3:40pm yesterday, got it this morning around 9:30am so thumbs up for the Excellent speedy delivery!
Right onto the laptop...
The box has changed a bit with the traditional brown insert that has the manuals/psu etc... it is now more of a box in a box- hard to explain. this is because they made room for the additional T-mobile HSPDA 3g Modem that is thrown in for free.
Opened up the packaging, plugged in the PSU (though 70% battery existed) and turned it on.
Went through the Vista setting up stages which took about 15minutes.
Once in, I was browsing through the laptop
Vista gives a score of 3.3 with the Go 7400 card, 2gb ram and 2.0 core 2 duo CPU
No bluescreens, crashes or anything so things are good despite some posts of people complaining about the SZ series bombing out.
Keyboard spacebar is fixed compared to the older models... and after using a HP Keyboard on a laptop (DV1000) while waiting for the sony... the sony does feel a little strange again! But it feels better than the sz2xp!
The fingerprint sensor works also, but is now more better at picking up than the SZ2 did
Thats the good news out the way
Bad news is, I still get tingling sensations on the body of the laptop
the fans are still on constantly (ruling out the 7200rpm drive i changed on the last one to be the cause)
And now the BAD BAD news
Sony still managed to get time to stuff useless applications in with the restore pack
While its better than the SZ2... heres the extras you're forced to live with:-
Sony WinDVD 8 for Vista (not an issue)
Microsoft Office 2003 Trial (an issue!)
Norton Internet Security Trial
Microsoft Works
Roxio suite
SonicStage
Adobe Reader 8
MS powerpoint viewer 2003
And then the usual Vaio stuff like Media, Diags etc
I want to format the machine today to clean up and only have Vista and my FULL apps instead of trial
Also, they no longer have the partitions split into two and instead have just the 1 partition... something i dont like as I normally have 3 (OS, Software, Docs)
What I am worried about is the lack of support on the software side of things - Basically, on the c:\ there is a Drivers folder with from what I can see, all the drivers that cover the laptop
BUT
Unlike the SZ2XP/C, there is no Utilities folder
This means, the camera, bluetooth, fingerprint sensor, HD protection and so on is not available if you format rendering most of the extras useless.
I checked the vaio website in downloads, it reads the s/n fine but there are no downloads available for it or pre-installed drivers/utils
so I'm a bit stuck at the moment
Not sure what else to add... I'll review it in detail in how it works when it has a clean OS and my own apps on it along with the tmobile card that I will activate later this week
BTW, the tmobile card fits into the Express slot (where your memory card adaptor could go in too) and has a simcard slot. T-mobile supply a simcard in which you ring them up and activate to be comptaible with 3G speeds (3.8 Mbps)
Its a 30 day trial but you could just carry on paying the monthly fees for this service
If anyone needs the drivers I have on the sony, do let me know, though I will always have a backup for them for the future
