 [Larger view] | Sony VAIO PCG-FXA47 Notebook (1-GHz Athlon, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive)
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Average user rating:  | |
 good solid machine | |
| sony has done a good job with is this relatively low-cost powerfull notebook. i will not bore you with the pros about this machine since you can find the good things all over but be aware that there are couple of things that sony could improve to make this laptop even better; first is that the user should have the freedom to upgrade the os at any time, i could not upgrade my vaio to winxp pro; second sony should have system boards that support pc133 sdram and ddr-sdram, the fx series only support pc100 dsram so you can't fully experience the power of the athlon with a slow memory bandwidth of a pc100 memory; third the fx series should be equipped with newer video cards, the ati rage is quite old and it only has 8mb sdram at 2x agp, i would strongly recommend at minimum a relatively new video card with 16mb ddr-sdram at 4x agp because the fx/fxa series are supposed to be powerfull machines; fourth, don't expect the battery to last you long since powerfull computers demand a lot of power and because amd cpu's eat up a lot of energy even their newest .18 micron cpu's. so these are just minor setbacks on sony fxa's, but if you compare these with other companies like hp, compaq, etc, you will find out that these flaws are almost nothing. ... | |
 It's not very good | |
| I bought it thinking that Sony was a good brand, but they clearly have no clue when it comes to making computers. The first problem is the battery life. At first, it could last 20 minutes of websurfing, but now it doesn't last five minutes of sitting still with nothing going on. It immediately powers down without shutting down of hibernating. The second problem is the default hard drive configuration. Basically, they split it up which causes more problems since so many programs install to the C: drive by default anyway, plus Windows XP is bloated and takes up the majority of the space anyway, then PC-Cillin tries to take up a lot of space too and you've almost lost all of your C: drive space from these two programs alone. The third problem is the graphics card. It's integrated with the normal memory and has horrible performance. While I don't expect to be playing the latest games on this machine, it's not even capable of playing games that are ten years old with a decent speed. The fourth problem that I have is the LCD itself. It's not very bright, and with any sunlight at all it's unreadable. Other than those, it's a pretty standard machine. I managed to avoid some of the software problems others have by uninstalling one of the hotfixes of XP and upgrading the mouse drivers. | |
| Worst computer ever | |
| If your are looking for a good used laptop..........look elsehwere. The FXA47 is loaded with software and problems and VERY POOR customer support. In the 2 years we have had it, it has stayed in the case most of the time because of lockups. I have restored it several times to original configurations with no help. Sony is clueless and wants to charge for phone supoport and has only responded to 1 of my e-mails. It seems that everytime we install software the computer wants to lock up. My Compaq 2715US works great with out any problems. I will never by another Sony product. |
