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So, on Monday after a very frustrating experience ordering my Vaio from Sony, my VGN-TX630P arrived. After using it for a few days, I believe that I will ultimatley return it.

I LOVE this laptop for many reasons. It's sexy, small (and I mean small), light, has the thinnest LCD I have ever seen. I HATE this laptop for the reasons I hate all Sony laptops. They took over 6 GB of my 60GB hard drive for the "recovery partition" I understand if this machine had no CD drive, but it has one, and the cost to burn a DVD with the OS and restore software can't be more than a buck. The kind of company that skimps on a buck is questionable. And of course, the minute I booted the laptop I knew I had to flatten it cause it was rat infested with OEM crapware.

So, off to create restore disks I go. Sony included software to burn the recovery partition to 7 CDs. That took an hour. Then I installed Windows, and proceeded to install about 15 "utilities" and "drivers" to get the laptop to function. Some of the utilities didn't install properly and I could not get the power management sofware to install. To give sony credit, they make the process of downloading the bits easy compared to other guys. But installing is a nightmare of orchestrated instructions that resulted in failure (and I'm not a dumb guy).

Anyhoo, after about 6 hours I was done. Then the fun began. I got everything working the way I wanted. I marveled at how empowered and unshackled I feel. I can take this laptop anywhere! It's thin, and feels like I am carrying around a notebook. It's even fast and doing my daily computing tasks is no problem at all. It resumes from standby in a jiffy and I just LOVE to use it. The keyboard took a bit of getting used to and I have to admit I don't like the painted keys. It feels flat. With 17mm keys and 1.7 mm of travel it feels cramped. I don't see the benefit of the EDGE support since it's expensive (49.99 a month with a 2 year contract) and slow (100 KBps vs EVDO which is upwards of 500 KBps) so I won't use that. It has a nifty feature that lets you watch DVDs w/o booting Windows. The battery life really is close to 7 hours and the carbon fiber case is stiff and scratch resistent.

Every laptop should be like this. I will never buy another > 4 lb laptop again. I can use this thing with one hand and balance it on a knee. HOWEVER, I found out this laptop's dirty little secret. It's NOISY.

The Vaio starts out very quiet. But after 10 or so minutes the CPU fan it humming a long. I figure it's about 26 bB loud at idle and 40 dB lout when it's actually doing something. I an VERY sensitive to fan noise and I can't have a laptop that's louder than my desktop machine. Normally the sound is not a problem at work, but at home it drives my crazy. Also, there is this weird red hue on the screen when looking at white backgrounds (I assume something related to the LED backlighting technology).

The bad news is that apparently there is a revision to the Vaio TX series called the TX2 due out later this year that does not have a fan at all. Oh well. I can't wait, I can't go back to my big huge dell.

So I am going to follow the advice of all my friends, and order the Fujitsu P7120. It's a very comporable laptop with similar size, weight, specs, and battery life except it HAS NO FAN AT ALL. It's also got an array mic, and the folks at Fujitsu are very nice to me. I also get a DVD burner (which cost an extra $300 on the Vaio). Finally, the keyboard on the Fujitsu is a bit more roomy than the Sony and has normal keys (not flat painted ones).

I ordered the Fujitsu today; it ships monday and the will overnight it for $30 or ship via ground for free. Sony on the other hand will ship the unit 2-3 business days after you order it, will charge you $70 for ground and $140 for overnight. Also Fujitsu will not crap all over my hard drive and they include a recovery disk on DVD.

I'll let you know how it goes. I'm going to keep the Sony another week till I evaluate the Fujitsu, but will in all likleyhood send it back to Sony for a refund. And all those folks that gave me crap about supporting the Rootkit company rest easy .

But I am going to miss the extra resulution on my Vaio. 1366 x 768 is a great display resolution for this small laptop. Those extra pixels matter .

In the end it will probably be a wash. I give a few things up, gain a few things I didn't have and I won't have to listen to a cpu fan every day.