Sony Vaio Series A owners...

My answers

My answers appear below.

Few questions for you:

1. What is your overall impression of the machine?

Very nice machine overall. I have not yet used the docking station, but the machine itself is very nice for work (Word, Exel) and surfing. I'm not a power gamer, so can't comment there. The screen is the main attraction for the system as it is bright, clear and very high resolution.

2. Satisfied with purchase?

Generally yes, however, it is a bit over priced.

3. What are you not satisified with?

I have a single bad pixel that goes red in areas of bright white or gray. The hard disk is about 25% slower than the newer 7,200 RPM drives. For the price, it should have come with 1Gig, not 1/2 Gig RAM. Upgrades look to be very difficult (to upgrade the second DIMM, you have to pry off the keyboard; there seems no easy way to get to the hard disk; the optical drive is not designed to swap out). The supplied power brick is quite large and heavy.

Also, I have been having some problems with DVD playback. Playback is choppy whenever there is a hard disk access. The picture freezes and likely drops a frame or 2 when this happens. I have defragmented the drive, run chkds, resized and made a fixed size the swap file, and a few other things. This has helped, but not completely eliminated the problem. I will next try adding more RAM and then reformatting the drive and reinstalling just the apps I want.

4. What third-party upgrades did you perform to enhance the system (HDD, memory, etc..)?

None yet, see 3 above.

5. Are you satisfied with the 64mb vram?

I don't have any applications that need more yet. Note that the GPU does run at a lower speed than in most other notebooks. You can fix this with 3d party utilities like radlinker, but by default, the GPU is slow (probably to reduce heat and power consumption).

6. Excluding price, would your purchase the machine again?

Probably. But there are new competitors arriving daily. So far, no one PC model has the screen quality to compete in a 17" wide screen form factor.

7. Any problems with machine, sony or retailer?

Just as noted above, the 1 bad pixel and the sometimes choppy DVD playback.


Enjoy,
Ira

How well does ut2004 run and does it have any ghosting? Thanks!


Oh, and has anyone upgraded their cpu or hard drive yet?

Further A190 thoughts

1. There are 2 dimm slots. One is easy to reach with a single screw on the bottom of the unit. The other is a pain to reach as you must pull 2 screws and then pry off the keyboard. This is documented in the user manual. Also, the A190 is disappointing as it comes with 2 256MB dimms, so increasing memory requires you to throw away dimms. As this is a Centrino system, there is no need to populate both memory slots, so Sony could have supplied the unit with a single 512MB dimm in the hard to reach slot, but no, Sony cheaped out a few bucks instead.

2. Sony does not document how to get to the hard drive (at least in the user docs). I have searched, but have not found any good directions for this either.

3. I like the keyboard and touch pad. They are comfortable. CNET just did a review of the A190 and commented on the keyboard in particular.

4. I'm not a fan of AMD CPUs, so the 4750 holds no allure for me. Also, I really like the 1920x1200 resolution on the Sony and have seen no other notebooks with a screen to match the A190.

Other stuff: I tried the video driver that came with the A190 and a few other DVDs and the choppy playback seems gone, so that is good. I've also seen some sales on the system that lower the price to $2500-2600 which makes it a bit easier to take.

Ira