Sony VAIO VGN-FZ140E/B 15.4" Laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7100, 2 GB RAM, 200 GB Hard Drive, Vista Premium)

There's a lot to look at with this laptop. Large screen, it's pretty, it seems to work fine. But Vista will break your heart and the graphics on this machine are not sufficient to run flight simulator (and I've got machines that seem downright scumpy and they'll run it). But it's not just hotel, road-warrior gaming. Office, all of my six-sigma stuff, just painfully slow. Oh and Sony won't even begin to talk to you about downgrading to XP. There have been any number of times where the machine just seems to lock up, a few times where the entire explorer session (files and all) go away. I'm certain this would be a great XP machine, but have no idea how to do it. Sigh. I seriously considered purchasing a Mac, and this machine makes me sorry I didn't follow my instincts.

really nice laptop, would recommed it although even with 2 gig of ram vista is not that great in performance.

This is my first online review of any product I have ever puchased. I recently got the FZN-140N Vaio and overall I think this laptop is garbage. Thankfully I use this only for work, so atleast I have my other laptop for personal use which is the HP DV6000 series laptop, and I absolutely love it.

Being that I use this laptop for work related things only, I use excel and word more than anything. I will almost always have atleast 3 spreadsheets open at any given time, plus outlook and another program or two. The problem I get is that somehow it runs out of memory/resources extremely fast. I could understand if I had 10 different programs running, but I will need to close one internet browser window before I can try to save a document/spreadsheet. If I want to open another spreadsheet, I have to close one first and then open it. After an hour or two of it acting like this, it will then freeze on me and I need to restart the thing. Did any of the work/spreadsheets I had open save you ask? No. They didn't. So around and around me and my vaio go.


The mouse is garbage too. I can't exactly put my finger on what I don't like the most about the mouse, but we don't work well together. Maybe its the texture or I just have sausage fingers, but its tiny and the scroll is out of control. I do appreciate the sideways scroll feature, but its not enough for me.

As for it being duo layer, and the size of the HD supposedly being impressive, I couldn't care less. I do not have a huge amount of large files to save, and I get to utilize the companys network, so all those big numbers have nothing for me. I would much rather use my old IBM R series laptop before I use the Sony again. Actually, I would rather use ANY other laptop than this one. The speed in which this laptop works is basically on par with what I could do should I use pen and paper. For around $1400 from J&R Electronics, I would walk right past it next time.

My next hurdle is figuring out which pre-installed programs to remove. Some of them sound pretty interesting, but this lack of memory/resources when Im working on spreadsheets has got to go.

Do I recommend this laptop to anyone? No
Will I ever purchase another Sony Vaio? No (Unless someone can help with this problem).
Am I happy with this laptop currently? Not at all.

In the past, I have used IBM(X,R,T), HP(dv2k, dv6k), Acer(insprire). I will give each of these other laptops 5 stars. Dell and Sony I would award them 3 stars and 2 stars.

I purchased my VAIO on 12/27/07. The first time I turned it on it would not boot. In the past four weeks Sony has had at least 6 people work on it -- locally and in San Diego. It still crashes before loading Vista. I was told my only recourse was to WRITE to the Sony Executive Committee - (they have no phone and no email . ..). 10 days later (not the "48 business hours" promised) I got a reply. They will not replace it with a working computer. They will not give a refund. Per the Sony warranty, my only option is to repeatedly send it in to the repair center that so far has been unable to detect the problem - much less fix it. IF you are going to purchase a Sony VAIO BUY IT LOCALLY. You can then deal with a local shop if you get a DOA computer. Sony quality assurance is sad. Their repair center is (apparently) incompetent. Their warranty does NOT guarantee a computer that will EVER work -- only endless repair attempts. I have spent many days trying to get this fixed -- and have not had 30 seconds of useful service from the computer.

I purchased a VAIO laptop two years ago. I still haven't had any problems with it. I just purchased my husband this VAIO for Christmas, and he loves it! User friendly, perfect size. The only thing I DON'T like is all the pre-loaded promotional ware (Spiderman trailer, etc) but one can easily delete all that. Another bonus of buying this from Amazon is you don't pay sales tax! Now THAT'S awesome! :)