When Sony began producing computers, I was less than impressed. Yet another big name producing very shiny products that look great while using second rate parts that deliver underwhelming performance. That was several years ago and while I still don't care for big name brand PCs, they are still good machines. Even though I build my PCs from parts I choose, I can't build a lap top, and after the Toshiba debacle, anything would have been an improvement. Truth to tell, I didn't really like the Toshiba from the start, but my wife wanted something cheap to take to work and use it to learn Spanish, practice her mathematics and watch the occasional movie, and the Toshiba did a fair job at all of those things. The Sony PCG-505DX is a vast improvement in every category, though it was twice the price.
The 505 features a 1.5 Ghz Pentium 4 Centrino processorpossibly the most important consideration when buying a laptop these days. The CPU scales its speed and processing ability to conserve power and extend the usability of the lap top. With the full charge the 505 will run for nearly 5 hours when doing things like word processing. Obviously, the more things you do, the shorter the battery life will be. The Vaio also sports a whopping 512 mb of RAM, an ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 with 16 mb of its own RAM, (a lot of laptops video RAM is actually shared with system RAM and performance takes a real hit), a 400 Mhz FSB, an 11 mb IEEE 802.11b `Wi-fi' wireless network adapter, 1 PC-MCIA slot, 2 USB + 1 IEEE 1394 FireWire ports, CD-RW & DVD player combo drive, Network and modem ports, VGA port, and a Sony memory stick slot. All of this is packed into a very small and very attractive box,. The casing also has a lot of polished aluminum, which will no doubt enhance the durability and life of the computer.
Though the S127 was fully 600 Mhz faster, the 505 out performs it every categoryit boots faster, loads programs faster, and came with much better software pre-installed. I actually plan to keep all of Sony's own music and video programs, which is odd as I usually spend the first day or so with any laptop I have owned blowing out all the junk and promotional software that comes with them. About the only things I removed was AOL and that really terrible office package known as Microsoft Works. Everything else will stay. Sony also wisely partitioned the 60 Gb hard drive to make mirroring the drive much easier. (What they didn't include was a system restore CD or DVD and instead require you to make your own. If you want to do this, make sure your have a stack of CD-Rs handy, because it will take 9 of them).
The 505 is actually pretty much the same size as my old 486 Compaq Aero, which itself was a dynamite little machine. I love the Vaio's design and feelit's sturdy, incredibly well made and given the luck we have had with our other Sony products, I suspect this little beauty will be around for a long time. About the only real complaints I have about it is the speakers sound terrible, but then again, this is a laptop and a general gripe about laptop keyboards in generalI just can't get comfortable with any of them. This is the best laptop I have ever owned in both performance and build quality. The screen image quality is great, the keys and controls intuitive, I only wish we had bought this first instead of the Toshiba.
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This is one of the best laptops I worked on. Though many people think 12.1" screen is smaller, I do not think so, it gives you an 1024x768 resolution which is very good, unless you are expecting your laptop to be a TV replacement to watch movies. I am a student and use my laptop for heavy software development and I never faced any problem with the CPU performance. Till now my experience with this new centrino processor is awesome. As for the battery life issues, it cant be better than this. Though compared to the other centrino machines this machine is bit expensive, but I pay for the style and brand and the quality of the product. Its been 3 weeks since I bought this notebook, and I never repented for paying the extra buck..AS for the other side,You have to make your own recovery CD's, which is very important step before you do anything with the laptop.. And I could not upgrade to windows XP professional, it gave me some virtual memory low message and kept on restarting after the installation was done, So I had to do complete installation of XP Pro. If the XP pro upgrade is not successful for you also, do not worry. You can put the recovery CD 1 and get all the software installed back on the clean XP professional. So there is a way around to keep the software which came with the machine and have XP pro.. And I am little disappointed SONY did not provide us with a third party CD writer software, we are forced to use the inbuilt XP writer, which is slow compared to NERO cd burner software or Roxio easy cd creator.. Overall you will get the value for your money..
And I do not understand why Amazon display's different specification on this website than what we see on sony. My laptop has an L2 cache of 1MB, but amazon displays here it as 512 KB which is very confusing. I didnt buy my notebook on Amazon becoz of that confusion..
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I've had the sony PCG-V505DX for more than 2 years and overall, I've been satisfied with it. What I like the most are the keyboard, the sleek feel of the computer, and its weight. It's a pleasure typing on it. The design is great and it's light enough to carry around.My only negative experience, unfortunately, was a near-catastrophic one. After about 8 months, it stopped working. It wouldn't even boot up. I called Sony's tech support and they were no help. In fact, their suggestion that I ship it in and they would reformat everything was less than helpful since saving my data was of utmost importance. Fortunately, I took it to a local shop and the guy fixed it in a day without any loss of data. Also, the warranty covered the repairs. However, the experience left me with little confidence in Sony's quality control and no confidence in their tech support.
All in all, the computer is a pleasure to use. However, the fact that the computer wouldn't even start up after just 8 months has convinced me that my next purchase will be of a company with a better reputation for reliability.
Honest reviews on Sony VAIO PCG-V505DX Laptop (1.40-GHz Pentium M (Centrino), 512 MB
The laptop is sleek, sexy, and is ergonomic enough, but apparently, there is a reliability issue. Mine stopped booting up after 18 months of normal use. I don't leave it running hot, I use that Targus cooling pad with a USB-powered fan.It was definitely not an LCD issue. The repair technician recommended that I replace the motherboard and/or CPU, but was unable to fix it otherwise.
I found this 66-page thread too late... but it's enough to keep me away from purchasing another Vaio to replace this broken one:
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Wow. I'm also surprised at all the negative reviews. Maybe I just got lucky, but this laptop has done everything I expected it to. Keep in mind that I've had it since March of this year... so that's a good 9 months of use. It's perfect for my school assignments. It runs things I need like MS Visual Studio just fine. And I can bring it to school without the power cord, knowing that I will have enough power to last me several hours.I even played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and City of Heroes on it over the summer break. For CoH, I had to kind of tweak the video card a bit... but that appears to be a known issue with customized laptop video cards (Mobility Radeons, to be precise).
Overall... I love this laptop.
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