Sony VAIO Lifestyle VGN-P688E/W 8-Inch Laptop - White
 List Price: Price: $963.65 You Save: $36.34 (4%) |
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Customer Reviews
expenditure is everythinglooks like Sony is bothersome to botch the netbook market like they did with the mp3 player. Too expensive for less doing, then you can get for 1/2 the price. Sony is turning into the GMC of electronics. Go with ASUS, or ACER.
Partiality it for the size not for the perfomance
This is a great product, in winodws 7 it perform ok, you have to keep in mind is a very small net book made for email et photo storage in a vacation , it like it do the job, do not change your home computer whit this...but think if it like a speare tire,
rated 4-5
Massive little laptop for travel; bit pricy and perhaps discontinued?
Article as advertised and no problems with purchase/delivery issues. Best expense I could find for this item.
Remedy! Some techie should put LINUX on this
This tragedy would be a great opportunity for some LINUX techie--
buy up all the castoff units at 10% of retail; modify to a decent fullfeature LINUX OS;
sell for 50% of retail !!!
Anyone listening? Sony?
You'll buy it for looks; unquestionably not worth the tag.
Peradventure I got a fluke, but Sony's so-called "full laptop" computer in an 8" form factor is like distressing to run Vista on your mom's old P3. Seriously, this thing absolutely crawls. All this would be acceptable were it not for the very poor battery life (forget 4 hours, I couldn't even manage 2 with fairly heavy use), when any other netbook (that's right, netbook) for well under half the price outperforms it in battery-operated life AND performance. Ironic; the 1.33Ghz processor really is a to down from the 1.66Ghz Atoms in netbooks, despite what I've been told to the contrary about the opposite "architecture."
But that's just on the hardware front. It powers on fast enough, but right from the get-go you're slammed with masses of bloatware and tons of programs that are slow to load into memory, one after the other (that's veracious, it's not even a dual core). These can be uninstalled--though not cleanly, as they leave some registry jettison data behind. But there's little that can be done about yet another software-related problem: drivers. The video driver on here is one of the worst experiences I've had to beau with video displays. HD video was an absolute disaster, even though the chipset (google "Poulsbo" or GMA500) claims it to be adept to decode 720p HD video. So when I tried to play a simple HQ youtube vid (not even HD) and met with stuttering far worse than my fellow's Asus Eee PC, which cost about 350, I was understandably upset. As for the faster disk plunge with the SSD, this may be true. But when you can't run even basic productivity apps at full speed, any HD speed expanding was unnoticeable. My Eee for instance has a conventional "slow" HD but gets the job done (except for copying files) much more pronto.
A lot of this might be Vista's fault. But before you think of downgrading to the faster, lighter XP, let me caution you--you'll have even more issues with Sony's drivers. Linux? Forget about it; Intel's Poulsbo drivers are in a pitiful magnificence there too. When the most appealing attribute of the system--the hi-res screen, mind you--is nearly unusable with any other options, one can't relieve but feel a bit ripped off. The webcam's quality isn't very good (the Eee wins again), and the WWan (transportable broadband) is locked to Verizon, so don't think about other companies unless you "unlock" the sliver: more time and trouble. The wireless-N support is supposed to be great, but it was dicky on my home network (maybe it was just my unit or config...or vista, but again, my other devices worked cute). They keyboard and ergonomics are fine, but again, the only good words for this element, for this price, are surface-deep.
Parting advice: the reviews on this "Lifestyle PC" are low for safe reason. I really wish I'd seen Amazon's reviews quicker. (This unit wasn't from Amazon but from Sony themselves).