Sony Vaio PCG-FX405

...was directed to both the Sony and Samsung range.

After having a "test drive" on both machines (both similar in specifications and price) I came down in favour of the SONY PX 405 because as well as having the sharper and brighter TFT screen, it also had a nicer feel about it whilst navigating around the desktop and the actual design of the laptop was nicer too.

So I took it home and first thing i did was turn ...
...a DVD, recorded a CD, loaded the software i use onto it. And it all worked as well as I would expect.

It was only after a while i found its faults. I decided to take my laptop on a train journey with me where there was no where to plug in to the mains so it had to rely on the fully charged battery. I opened it up, turned on, once it had booted up it had already lost about 15% of its battery power. I opened an applications, and after ... more

Whilst looking to purchase a laptop I had a certain amount of criteria that I needed from my laptop. These included -

- Large amount of disk space (i.e. over 10 Gb) as I would be doing a lot of design work on it and would need lots of space to save files.

- CD writer, as i would need to record various pieces of work onto CD to present my work or to take it to a print shop to get my work printed.

- Fast processor, as i would be producing various designs and using powerful RAM sucking programs, I would need it to process the tasks as quickly as possible to cope with the activities i would be doing.

- Relevant ports (e.g. USB, parallel, Serial, Audio, Visual...) to allow me to connect various other hardware.

I had been recommended getting an Apple Macintosh "Power Book" as they are very powerful machines. The two major things that put me off these were

1. THE PRICE as they seemed to be about 50% more expensive than the PC equivalents.

2. THE LAYOUT Apple Macintosh computers have a different keyboard layout as well as a different Operating System (i.e. they do not use windows).

After I expressed my above concerns and expressed what I would be using the laptop for, I was directed to both the Sony and Samsung range.

After having a "test drive" on both machines (both similar in specifications and price) I came down in favour of the SONY PX 405 because as well as having the sharper and brighter TFT screen, it also had a nicer feel about it whilst navigating around the desktop and the actual design of the laptop was nicer too.

So I took it home and first thing i did was turn it on and find out what it actually does, played a DVD, recorded a CD, loaded the software i use onto it. And it all worked as well as I would expect.

It was only after a while i found its faults. I decided to take my laptop on a train journey with me where there was no where to plug in to the mains so it had to rely on the fully charged battery. I opened it up, turned on, once it had booted up it had already lost about 15% of its battery power. I opened an applications, and after about 20-30 mins it was telling me to save my work as it was almost out of power. This was somewhat of a shock to me. I did not know how long the average laptop could work from battery for. But I just assumed it would be longer than half an hour. (after researching on the internet I was made aware that this laptop was one of the worst for running off the battery).

Another downside to this laptop is the fact that you are not able to upgrade the computers graphics (it comes with an 8Mb ATI Rage - Mobility Graphics Card) which for 3D rendering (or playing games that rely on 3D graphics) it is not up to the job.

All in all this is a pretty average laptop compared to others available at the moment. The only plus side is that you can pick one up for about £700 which for a laptop is very cheap. I don’t think I would recommend this as i know if you spent a little more you could get a laptop which is 3 times better than this laptop.

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SPECIFICATIONS

- 1 Gig AMD Athlon 4 processor,

- 20Mb Hard drive (2 individual 10Mb discs)

- 256 MbRAM,

- A CD Re-writer combined with -

- A DVD Player (this can be plugged into wide
screen player just like a normal player - or even
watched on the TFT screen)

- Audio CD player (built in speakers)

- Windows XP Home Edition

- Data Transfer cables

- Network point and network card

- 15" inch visible TFT screen

- Built in V90 modem

- Telephone Port

- Free AOL Trial (as if I haven’t got enough of
these already)

- 2 USB Ports

- Parallel port for Printer/Scanner

- Serial p ort to link to an additional monitor - (although believe me with the TFT screen is brilliant and you will not need it).

- 3 year extended warranty that covers me for accidental damage

- "Standard" battery power is 1 hour 15 minutes, not very long compared to many of the other machines on the market, but "apparently" the bigger the processor the more power it uses, hence the short life-time.  

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