Customer Ratings & Reviews

I just received my laptop in the mail today and I absolutely love it! It's light weight, fast processor, blu-ray, huge hard drive capacity! The only thing that isn't so great when playing a blu-ray movie, the sound does not go high enough. Watching a movie in netflix is pretty good though. The sound quality is better in netflix then watching a blu-ray movie. Strange.....Other than that, it is a fantastic laptop!!

This is a great laptop over all for the price. It has a fast processor and a very nice hi-res display. Window 7 startup was fast, and the blu-ray disc drive is great especially when you can take your laptop to someones house that have no blu-ray player. The bad things about the laptop is no fingerprint reader, the spearker not the best, battery life questionable and black leaves finger marks.

Pretty much the highest-spec laptop money can buy for under $1000. Not as light or long-running as the Z-series (battery life = 3.5hrs actual), but also 1/2 the price.... Can run anything you throw at it, and has the largest notebook HDD available as I type this. Black chassis is an EXTREME fingerprint magnet. Display is wonderful, but doesn't like being viewed far off-angle.

This laptop is extremely quick, and comes with just about everything you need. It is very portable, and unlike other users, I could really care less if it shows fingerprints. It is lightweight and has pretty good battery length for a 6 cell. For only $150 more you can get this model instead of the i3 model. It is a little bit faster and has a little more memory.

Got my Sony from Bestbuy.com in only 2 days.....its sweet, alittle bigger overall than expected when you hear 14" screen, I have a 15.7" dell which size wise seemed almost perfect but still alittle large 14" just said netbook to me but this should actually be a perfect combo of size and portability.. also what your gonna love about the portability is that it does run cooler than most laptops which i believe is the BIGGEST benefit from the new Intel® Turbo Boost Technology because it doesnt just speed it up when you need it but it slows it down when you dont need it. It seems to idle at 1.197Ghz x9 multiplier and then the multiplier changes to speed up the processor to what you need, ive only got it to 20x which is 2.66Ghz and thats running SuperPi and a bluray and a couple of web browsers... but task manager shows it onlly needs 32% of the CPU and 2G of memory to do all that!!! wow so maybe when i get my video editing stuff on here it'll go to the rates 2.9Ghz. But the more you use the hotter the laptop will run. . anyways heres a few quick specs for you all.. Windows Experience Index scores Processor: 6.7 Ram: 5.9 Graphics: 6.4 Gaming: 6.4 Disk: 5.8 These are all pretty nice scores for this price range. I originally was going to order this laptop directly from the manufacture but after i found this deal thanks to a Notebook review website it really was a no brainer. This combo on BB have a 330M video card thats not available on the manufactures website and neither is the 1600x900 screen. So at this price with these options and throw in the bingcashback, and WOW the perfect deal. This thing is fast too of course and should handle everything most users would need it too, as a reference heres a quick speed check - SuperPI 1M = 16.67 secs which is great, my AMD Athlon x4 OC'd to 3.6Ghz is at 22 secs I watched 3 Blurays last night without a hitch or updates needed, although there is an update available via VAIO update for the corel player. I watched 2 on my HD tv via HDMI cable.... looks fantastic. I watched one on the laptop itself, you can hear a quiet disk drive noise as your watching but you forget about it pretty quick- but it is there... atleast on mine... another things you'll need headphones if your trying to watch a movie anywhere but a quite room, these speakers SUCK... volume wise. Thats why i gave it a 4 on convience because you'll need to bring headphones if your planning on watching a movie in public. The movie looks great on the laptop though but if you've got a 1080p with 120hz or smoothmotion TV then you wont be using the laptop screen. also yea very pretty low heat even during the movie, and the "display off" button is perfect when you use your laptop as a player....(but i'd rather be able to just close the laptop) I'll update the review again later with more benchmarks and video editing performance.

Fast and Reliable, I can't believe you can get more in this Laptop than a Macbook for the price with an awfully upgraded processor and graphics, you might wanna got for this laptop before goes sold out again, the only little thing that bugs me a bit the speakers and the webcam quality.

The design and the new i5 microprocessor attracted me too much before my purchase, and I am delighted to wait for this new generation processor. Performance is great, whereas the laptop never gets hot unless you put it on your bed for hours. The screen and BD video is worth to tell about. You can use this computer as a sole Bluray player with lovely display :) The only thing I do not like about the display is that it reflects your view in the video :) in daylight. At the other hand, low battery life may be an issue, if you travel long, however the battery works for around 2.5 hours on average use although the maximum is 4 hours. However that does not make sense, as my wife has a Vaio SR series laptop, and although the maximum battery time is said to be around 6 hours, it also works only 2.5 hours on the battery. So, be careful about the charging time if you buy a Sony laptop.

My decision to purchase this laptop came after a very painstaking process of considering all different types of portables, including netbooks, ULV processors, and brands including the Macbook Pro and the varying Sony lines including the SR and Z series. Money was not really an object, so long as not to be wasteful. Laptops all use similar internal components, including specified Intel processors, RAM manufacturers, and hard drive manufacturers. It is surprising that the limited parts laptop manufacturers do make themselves vary so much without an objective consensus of end-user experience. There are still many manufacturers including HP, Compaq, and Asus, for example, that do not place the trackpad centered between the G and H keys such that the palms cause unwitting cursor movement. What an unthoughtful inattention to an important detail. This laptop has perfect placement of the trackpad. Also, the feel of this trackpad is exceptional, even better than on that of the MacBook Pro. It is smooth, while allowing just enough traction, even with sweaty fingers. This is in sharp contrast to the feel of the trackpad on the HP or Compaq computers, which are overly slick without traction for dry fingers, while being sticky for perspirated fingers. Asus and even other models of the Vaio have trackpads that have raised bumps which cause sore fingers after extended use. Everyone has gotten these from the raised notches of mouse scroll wheels. Some manufacturers like Toshiba just went and got rid of the ledge between the trackpad and the palmrest, which is necessary to quickly feel where page scrolling happens, but the ledge on this Vaio is clearly pronounced. This Vaio got the trackpad right. This is the best video card you will find on a 14" and under laptop. I was seriously considering the Macbook Pro at one point but the graphics card on that wasn't even a dedicated card. This card blows away even anything on a Dell XPS or anything you can configure on a Dell Studio 14. It is nice to have a processor you know will boost up to 2.9 GHz. However, honestly, I don't feel a speed difference with everyday tasks compared to my old Core 2 Duo laptop. No matter how fast the components are, there are still the bottlenecks of internet bandwidth (even though I have 10Mbps download) and the hard drive seek time (which seems a little slower than my old Scorpio Blue) The battery life lasts 2 hours on wifi and 4 hours with wifi turned off. I have not tested the battery life while watching movies or playing games. There has been a lot of praise about the 1600x900 resolution. This has not been a bonus for me. At this resolution, the text is prohibitively small, and there is no difference in picture and movie sharpness. I have reverted back to a 1360x768 resolution. This laptop runs very cool, as mentioned by other reviews. This is in large part to placement of large air vents openly accessible on the side of the laptop as opposed to hidden underneath the screen hinge of the Macbook Pro or inaccessibly at the bottom of the machines on HPs. The decision of placement of air vents is a critically important one, as poor cooling causes overheating and CPU failure. It is obvious which companies care more about looks over function by these poor decisions. Almost every review here knocks the speakers. They are not as poor as what the other reviews imply. I expected to not be able to hear a streaming news broadcast while in my room, for God's sake. They are fine. Just don't expect to watch and listen to a movie at a movie-watching volume while on a couch 10 feet away. That's what a stereo receiver is for. I also expected to hate having to press FN every time I wanted to mute the sound or change the volume. This has been unfounded, as these keys have been considerately placed almost directly above FN, so that volume can be changed with one hand. I also expected the monitor to be very glossy and that I would have to put up with seeing my reflection through the screen most of the time. This is not the case since you can almost always adjust the screen angle so that this is not a problem. The screen brightness and colors are brilliant. I do appreciate the feel of the keyboard. Typing is very comfortable. However, I would try out the keyboard of a lower Vaio CW model that is sold in-stores at Best Buy. It is easy to run into the edge of the keys which could lead to more typing mistakes, but that is personal preference. In summary, I loved the thoughtfullness in the design of this laptop and am satisfied with my purchase especially when compared to all the other options available.

For the price you cannot get a better laptop. It's fast, convinient, comes with lots of extras and has a pretty good battery life. The extras and benefits of this laptop far outweigh the little things that aren't so great - smudges easily, the speakers aren't the best.

The packaging was very flimsy. There was no foam or any other major pieces to support the actual laptop. If it stops working caused by the drop from the shipment, I will never know. It had no problem starting up. I wanted to try the Turbo Boost feature, but couldn't find it anywhere. How can I verify this? In terms of speed, I was expecting more from it. It wasn't blazing fast like other reviews had mentioned. I'm not sure if I'm suppose to activate turbo boost or it functions automatically. So I'm still trying to figure it out. Graphics is excellent. I got my computer 3 hours ago, so I'm still playing with it. Overall, I am still very excited about my new toy.

I have had the laptop for about 2 weeks now and have been very satisfied. Considering the physical size, the sreen resolution is great for handling multiple windows. All in all, i consider it a high specification laptop at a great price.

Super fast machine. Windows 7 has a few things I don't like, but overall is good. I am not keen on the wide screen display. I would much rather have the traditional style as I feel it makes full pages much easier to read.

I've been in the market for about a month looking for a 13-14" laptop. Been to newegg, fry's, microcenter etc..and my last stop, bestbuy.com. I finally bought it. Called the 888 bestbuy number and placed my order. To my delight, the representative gave me free overnight shipping (Tip: if you're a rewards card member, it's worth calling in your order asking for free shipping! So far it has worked for me for about 2-3 orders now!) Anyway, this laptop ROCKS!! Display is stunning and fast! I'm a photogrrapher and use CS4, Lightroom to edit photos from my Nikon D3X. So far no problems! These large photos loads fast and editing has been a breeze. High performance usage for me lasted about 1 hour on the battery but about 2.5 hours browsing/emails on balanced performance. I don't like the speakers that much but then again no laptop speakers are ever really good enough :-) Just use headphones :-) Watched blue ray on it already, it looks great on the screen and even better on my LCD HDTV thru HDMI. I like the "Display Off" feature, save battery life and screen life in the long run. I will be upgrading the HD to a 7200rpm for even more faster performance. All in all, you can't really go wrong this laptop. Price and feature wise, it's very hard to beat. I bought this at $949 where newegg, amazon and other places are selling it 1100+.

Positives: The screen size and size of this laptop is truly perfect. It is very similar in size to a 16:10 13" laptop. It is SMALLER than a 16:10 14" laptop. The size for the amount of performance you get is pretty radical. It looks good turned off. The screen has a very high density resolution (make sure you want this, if you don't like fine detail and small fonts you may prefer the regular screen resolution). The 330M and Corei5 combo make for a cool running and very quick laptop. It comes with sufficient RAM (4GB) and hard drive space (500 GB). Negatives: Does not come with recovery media. Worse yet, it fails to recognize it's own optical drive for burning my own recovery media. I wish we would all just boycott products without recovery media. It's really a very lame way of saving $1. They'll charge you $75.00+ if they even decide to sell it to you down the road if you need it and don't have it. I was tempted to knock it down to 3 stars over this but I didn't even count it. The screen has so much potential, but it ultimately dissapoints because it has terrible viewing angles (yes, this is typical these days, but it doesn't make it any less terrible). It's also kind of generally buggy. The VAIO apps are not polished enough and I recommend to Sony to make less of them and polish them much much more. This product had so much potential. It still delivers well enough I suppose. And windows 7 is a wonderful operating system (better than Mac OS in my experience). I think if you're looking for a fully polished system. I would limit my search to Lenovo ThinkPads (not ideapads) and MacBook Pros. Would I recommend this item to a friend? Not quite, because a lot of peoplehate tiny fonts and I would not take the plunge on recommending a product that's not quite ready. If you're a techy, if you love performance and play games... I think yeah absolutely buy this laptop (it's as you know the fastest laptop this side of a thousand dollars).

I had my sights set on the 2010 Macbook Pro 13" but when they released it using older Intel Core 2 Duo processors, I was forced to look at the Macbook Pro 15" with a $1800 price tag. I was open to looking at PCs also so I did my online research and found this machine. Performance wise, the VAIO CW27FX takes the cake over the Macbook 13" and pretty equivalent to the 15". Sure the VAIO doesn't have the nice aluminum unibody case nor does it have a 10 hour battery, but if those are not important to you, this is an awesome machine. Windows 7 has been a nice surprise too. I tried to rationalize buying the 15" Macbook Pro for twice the price of this VAIO but I kept coming up empty. I even asked the apple guy at the Apple Store (not the Apple guy at BestBuy but at the actual Apple Store) why I should spend twice the cash on the Macbook Pro 15", his reply was that Apple has great customer service and even has classes to help you use your macbook. Neither are great advantages and frankly not worth double the price of the VAIO. Overall, I love the machine. It has everything you could want, Intel i5 processor, blue ray player, dvd burner, 4GB ram upgradeable up to 8GB, 500 GB hard drive, SD/CF/Sony memory card slots, Dedicated GPU 512MB, High Res screen 1600x900 which is awesome for viewing HD video taken on my Canon T2i, webcam, blue tooth etc etc etc Thing I would improve: The case is a little less than desirable but not that bad. The case finish is glossy black so prepare to have a nice micro fiber cloth to wipe clean finger prints and such. Its a little annoying but after a while you won't even notice however it would have been nice if the finish inside the lid was a matte texture. This is just a minor complaint only since it is purely cosmetic. This thing comes with a ton of bloatware installed with software from different manufacturers that basically do the same thing. Its a little annoying. Viewing angle like others said is limited but seems to be the case with most laptops these days. So long as your not jogging or moving around a whole lot this should be manageable. Battery life is short, relative to Macbooks, but probably on course with other PC notebooks. Not a big deal for me as I am usually plugged in. Thats about it. I have been using this laptop for photo and video editing (Sony Vegas Platinum Pro 9) and have been impressed so far. Great laptop all around!

This is hands down the best 14" laptop for the money, performance is top notch and handles applications like a breeze. Do not pay attention to the negative reviews about the screen frame being too flexible, novice users or competition wrote these. I am Dell, IBM and Sony certified for laptop repair and while there is some flex to the bezel I wouldn't worry about screen breakage, unless you are rough on equipment and then it doesn't matter what brand you buy the screens going to break and you should probably be using a Toughbook. I have an Acer and an Asus sitting right here in front of me and they all have the same screen flex. That aside for the price you get lots of options that can't be matched by anyone, including bluetooth. The speakers aren't the greatest and are adequate, but it's a laptop, use external or headset if you want better sound for music and gaming. As for gaming I ran Wolfenstein, Mass Effect 2 and BioShock 2 with most of the settings on high without any problem. The best thing I like about this laptop is the screen resolution 1600x900, I wanted a 14" screen with a high resolution and tried to find one, Lenovo has one but doesn't use the Geforce graphics card and gaming is close to impossible, viewing angle is pretty good looking straight at it it's perfect.

I was deciding between this one and the Toshiba with HD wireless bundle for $900 but I finally got this for the resolution and the graphic card. I have not watched any thing HD on it but the quality of the picture is very nice and its performance is fine. The speakers are OK. But sometimes it does not shutdown or hibernate properly and I have to force shutdown it but I am not sure what is the cause of the problem (probably windows)

I would recommend this laptop. It is easy to use, graphics is great and it is light-weight.

I bought this laptop when i came to US for a visit, from the first sight i fall in love in it, beautifully crafted machine like a virgin girl or like a rare wine. When i used it i astonished with the speed and the graphics offered by sony in a price tag of grand. The only problem i found was the easily scrachable shiny top but i am very happy to have it.

This laptop is awesome, great performance and features like the blueray drive make it even better. Shopped around for weeks before deciding on this model. Totally better quality feel than all of the other brands laptops that I tried out in the store, Sony always seem to deliver a great product.