Sony Vaio VPCF1390x Quad Laptop - Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Review

Customer Ratings:

I had purchased this laptop directly from Sony about two years ago. Immediately I noticed that the fan is loud! A fresh boot, wait your four minutes for everything to load and the fan is just noisy. After a while you kinda got used to it. The second thing is the keyboard would stop functioning after a reboot. No lights, no buttons, nothing worked. To fix, I had to close the lid to sleep mode. Then reopen the lid and wake up computer, to find that the keyboard now works fine and all lights are working also. The last thing was the screen is now black. After some research, two different techs examined it (one at the Sony Store) and both said to replace the motherboard. The video chip is broke, so the whole board needs to be replaced. I've 'googled' new boards and cant seem to find a replacement board online. The Sony Store said I could send it in for repair and that a motherboard repair is considered a 'major' repair, its minimum $300, no parts. At this point it just be cheaper to buy a new, cheap laptop for that and buy an extended warranty to cover future breakdowns. Or just consider building a desktop. Either way, $1000+ laptop, worthless.

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I bought a VPCF1390X directly from Sony about a year ago. I am now planning to sell it and get something a little lighter and less annoying to use.

The good: this model has excellent port options, as I would expect of a high-end notebook, including two USB 3.0 ports, eSATA and HDMI output. Overall it is constructed well (with the exception of the cooling system, described below), and the keyboard is ample and well designed. It boasts a nice, large widescreen display, which is glossy (I actually prefer matte, but your mileage may vary). While I didn't care for much of the bloatware that Sony installed, I was ecstatic that they included Adobe Elements with Acrobat 9 Standard (which is apparently difficult to get by any other means).

The bad: I was disappointed in the performance of this notebook. Compared with my old 2007 model HP DV8000T, this newer and more powerful notebook actually seemed to lag when operating internet and simple desktop programs. It did have an advantage in being able to run 64 bit Windows, newer games and looked nicer, but it didn't really do any of that very well. The bloatware that comes on the Vaio also seems to contribute to it getting bogged down and running at higher temps, which brings me to the next point...

The ugly: My VPCF1390X is outfitted with an Intel Core i7 840QM processor factory rated at 1.87Ghz and 45W TDP, as well as discrete NVIDIA Geforce GT 425M graphics. As such, there's variable demand on the notebook's cooling system, and there's where the problem creeps in. The laptop's cooling is freaking loud. This is to be expected with most i7 CPUs and discrete graphics card, but there's an additional problem with the laptop's fan: a high-pitched whistle at mid-speed. Sony spent the better part of 2011 troubleshooting this problem, but eventually was unable to resolve it. Some users have published guides and videos showing a procedure that is supposed to eliminate this, but I had no success with it, perhaps because it doesn't work with my unique hardware. If the thing was just loud like any other high-end laptop, I wouldn't be too bothered, but with the fan speeds oscillating up and down constantly and fading in and out of this annoying whistle sound, I've gotten so tired of using this thing that I'm done with it.

This is probably the most uninformed purchase I've made when it comes to electronics. Hopefully I won't repeat that mistake with my next notebook.