- Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
-
3.5 stars
"Great sidekick for a 15 - inch PowerBook"
Pros: Light, good screen, great graphics card.
Cons: no dvi, windows lets it down, screen has no real latch, ugly tray system for the dvd drive. screen can be too reflective, expensive even for mac owners, the bottom of the machine is fugly
Summary: My main use for this notebook was to use with microstation (CAD application). I already own an Apple PowerBook, but unfortunately Bentley Software stopped supporting the mac version (even when there was a lot of interest over the mac version) and there hasn't been an OS X release of microstation v8. So i did what any person would do and contacted bentley and got others to do so, but the answer was still no. After that i decided to buy a windows machine to use for cad only and use it in conjunction with my mac. I needed somthing small and light so i could carry two computers in the same bag. I found what i was looking for with sony and this system was actually more than i was looking for. So I purchased it and downloaded one of the many cracked versions of microstation ( yes you read that right, I won't buy the software until they make a full release on OSX, considering they have parts of it written in unix this is pure laziness, or pressure from certain software firms. I'm not making any money from it since I'm still an architecture student).
Runs the software quite well, although it still crashes, but that isn't bentleys fault (it's a good thing that it saves all your work all the time otherwise I'd be screwed).
I don't connect it to the net since the last PC i had (a mobile P4 vaio) got so many viruses it wasn't a joke. Connecting to it via my PowerBook (wifi) is easy enough and I can share all my files. Bluetooth on the vaio is let down by the setup eature built into windows, i'll stick to my mac for sms messaging (bluephone elite is a great tool for that)
It has enough porst for what I need it for but i was dissapointed to find that it only had a vga connection not a dvi. If you had dvi the quality would be vetter and it would support newer screens, plus if you get a small cable adapter you can use it with vga. I don't use it to connect to projectors because it takes too long to set up. The software sony supplies with the machine is complicated for average users, but the supplied adobe software is welcomed.
The actual computer looks quite good for a pc, but the dvd drive is horrble compared to my slot loading drive on the PowerBook (who cares if i can't load funny shaped discs). The screen has not latch which is good and bad, good because the one on my previous vaio was big and ugly and bad because I feel better knowing that it won't fling open.
Overall this is a great machine and I'm sure that most windows users would love to own one, there are some things missing that would make it totally awesome. I know that if it ran a different OS such as linux, or os X (if it could) the experience would be a lot more reliable and better in terms of the user experience and utilizing the graphics card to its full potential.
Bottom line:
-If you are a windows user looking for a light powerful windows machine, this is a really great option.
-For a mac user who needs a windows machine to run software that won't be ported over to the mac (even after a lot of argueing wit the developer) this will pretty much run what you want, just don't expect it to be reliable and for the love of god don't connect it to the internet (especially without antivirus software), you're just asking for trouble.
For those who use microstation or autocad or 3d studio max please contact the software developers to ask for macintosh versions, it gives everyone more choice to use the software they want on the os they prefer.
Thanks for reading this, I hope it helps.
