Customer Ratings & Reviews

I want to start with something that I was looking for when I was reading laptop reviews as this allows at-least me to compare apples-to-apples when shopping for laptops i.e. Windows Experience Index score.. see below Windows Experience Index: 5.9 (determined by lowest sub-score) Processor: Calculations per second sub-score: 6.8 Memory (RAM): Memory Operations per second sub-score: 5.9 Graphics: Desktop performance for Windows Aero sub-score: 6.4 Gaming graphics: 3D business and gaming graphics performance sub-score: 6.4 Primary hard Disk: disk data transfer rate sub-score: 5.9 This is actually some of the best numbers I have seen for a laptop with this configuration under 5.5 lbs. I have been using this for over a month now and I am yet to be disappointed. In-fact just the opposite, I am loving it!! This laptop has everything I need a light weight laptop that will let me do my daily work like web-surfing, logging into work via VPN and watching HD videos online. I usually have multiple applications open at once and wanted a laptop that will not stall if I do so and this vaio does it for me. The build quality is pretty good and the additional Blu-Ray player although not a requirement for me comes in handy once in a while. The Mic and webcam that come installed are very handy as-well. All in-all, I could not have asked for a better deal. Please do note that I purchased an HP ENVY prior to this and returned that back to get this VAIO which I am very happy with now. The finger print magnet issue is not that bad as the finger prints are not that visible after-all and thus it does not bother me at all. The 14 inch screen is just the right size for me as I have noticed that with wider screen laptops a lot of the screen is unused anyways. So my money has obviously been put on this machine and I am keeping it for as long as this promises to last.

I researched laptops for months before settling with the Vaio CW. I'm glad I waited for the new i5 chip from Intel, it's smokin' fast running Windows 7. It took me no time to set up the laptop, make my recovery disks, and loaded it up with my 100GB of music! What took me a while was turning off/uninstalling all the Vaio software that really drags the performance of this machine. I also removed Norton which is a HOG! Go for the Trend Micro Virus software you can buy for $20 here on Bestbuy.com. It's much less memory intensive...and cheap! The speakers are good for a laptop....Use Bose headphones or speakers if you want a better sound people! My only grip is the glossy black is prone to fingerprints, but that's not a deal breaker for this great machine! Bottomline, this is a great machine for the money. I even called Sony directly and you can't get the 1600x900 screen and NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M GPU with 512MB dedicated video memory from Sony! Bestbuy did a great job configuring this one! Go for it!

This was the first laptop I have purchased since I have always had a laptop through my work. I had considered the red case version but in the end settled on black - which hasn't been a disappointment. The glossy black finish and slender design makes a very attractive and elegant pc. I chose this model because I wanted a laptop with a (relatively) small footprint and the 1600 x 900 display. Another key selling point for me was the nVidia graphics card as I wanted to view movies and play games as well as browsing the internet. Considering the widescreen format the Vaio is a slender and relatively lightweight laptop. The graphics have not disappointed - I have used the Vaio with an HDMI cable to watch TV programs from HULU on an LCD TV which delivered video that was as good or better than cable programs on the same tv. The Intel i5 processor was another key feature in my decision - although the performance has been a bit disappointing. The laptop comes with Win7 Home Premium - which failed to impress - so I upgraded to Win7 Ultimate (64bit). There really wasn't any discernible improvement in performance. From talking to BB staff I believe that most of the performance hits are due to bloatware and Norton 360 - which is seems to be designed to run almost continual background system scans. Win7 also has - as most probably already realize - difficulty running older applications. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this as some of the oldest programs work while others won't even install. With Win7 Ultimate I also installed Windows Virtual PC which provides an XP environment - but it's a real dog regarding performance - with 4gb of system memory. The only other niggles I have had are more related to the fact that I have been using Thinkpad pc's for years. Thinkpads are built like a tank - and although their performance was nothing spectacular they were reliable and could take the knocks that invariably come when you are carrying a laptop around. The Sony doesn't have that same robust feeling - in fact on the CW if you grasp the base along the DVD bay the case will flex quite noticeably - it feels as if a slight knock would crack the casing. Although the other 3 sides of the case feel much more solid. I also prefer the keyboard layout on the Thinkpad - but with so many years of use on them I suppose that is not surprising. In summary the main reasons I chose the Vaio over the Thinkpad models was - performance (graphics and processor), seperate graphics card and styling. Judged on that criteria the Sony wins hands down. The only other laptop that I would consider if I had to chose again would be the Apple Mackbook Pro. - which probably beats the Vaio on some of the above criteria - and with it's aluminum case has a very solid feel. In the end I didn't go for that model as I didn't want to re-learn the O/S interface - and because you have to crack the case to get at the battery,

The laptop works great, it is fast and the keyboard is comfortable with the chiclet style keys. It is fairly light and with the WiFi off and brightness down the battery lasts just over 3 hours. My only issue is the right side of the case around the DVD slot bends with very little pressure and the plastic around the monitor is flexible (you can see the screen change if you press anywhere around the bezel). I would still recommend it as a great purchase, i have not had any problems with it. Would be nice if it included a 7200 RPM hard drive but it is still very responsive.

Great laptop for the price. It's a little steep, but is more than a hundred dollars cheaper than getting the same specs through Sony's site. Compared to a Mac (which honestly looks the exact same!) for this price, you're looking at maybe a third of the specs. Blu Ray player was the clinching factor for me, as not many computer come with all the specs and have a Blu Ray player available. Area where you rest your hands does smudge a bit, but the keyboard will remain spotless. If you've never had a key board like this it takes a little time to get used typing on keyboard, but isn't a problem. Battery life is average, but keep in mind how powerful this computer is!

I am not an avid gamer, but had been looking for a laptop with great memory, relatively high end processor and a graphics card which wasnt Intel Chipset based. So much so that i passed on deals during thanksgiving and Christmas. and let me say this, i dont regret that decision one bit. i have seen people complain about speaker sound, but its a laptop. my older vaio (VGN-FS 570) has lower sound than this, but i can play any media and be assured of a good hearing sound. If you want home theater quality sound, hook it up to one. the only issue i had/have is that my new laptop came with a HDD problem where it makes clicking noises randomly and shuts off. 1 month into the problem, and still Sony has not let me send it to them for a replacement HDD Also, i do miss the separate Page UP, down, Home & End keys. but i guess i had to compromise some place to get the 14 inch laptop. I must say this, for sony laptops, i think this thing has great battery life. i have now used it on 3 west coast-east coast flights and the battery has lasted me close to 3.5hrs while playing videos with sound (without any recharge). my vgn never gave me more than 2 hrs on the standard battery even without videos or sound. All in all, if it werent for the HDD issue, i would be giving it 5 stars. but....

I've owned this thing for 4 days. So far it hasn't disappointed me. I've downloaded all my STEAM games while playing games (Guild Wars & Crysis) and it runs smooth most of the time. I've noticed some random system lock up or freeze, but I'm going to assume it's due to the trial Norton Symantec scanner. I experienced lost audio for no reason requiring a Restart once. Resolution changing during BR-DVD use, which you can manually change. Audio speakers are very weak compared to my old Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop. LCD viewing varies with lighting and eye level requiring tilt adjusting. No Home or End buttons as far as I can tell visually looking at keyboard. I am surprised this thing ran Crysis at max LCD resolution with combination of Medium and Low settings and no AA at playable fps. Guild Wars, Half Life 2, Lost Coast, and Episode 1 are more than playable with high settings, AA 2-4X, no v-sync and max resolution. Games that were unplayable: Gears or War and F.E.A.R. 2 Demo. No GPU driver update from Nvidia yet. Everything works out of box (BR-DVD drive, Webcam, HDMI, Bluetooth, Memory stick readers, etc.). Haven't tested the Microphone port since I don't have one on hand, but going to assume that works like everything else. For the price and size it is quite impressive. I'm not sure how the Intel GPU works, since I can't find anything in Device Manager spec listing. I'm assuming it kicks in to assist the GT 330M, but am not sure. CPU and GPU down clocks when nothing intensive is happening based on CPU-Z & GPU-Z monitor readings. I couldn't be happier with this laptop's capabilities and performance. GPU-Z 0.3.8 min/max specs: Memory Type: GDDR3 Bandwidth: 21.8 GB/s GPU Clock: 135/475 MHz Memory: 135/680 MHz Shader: 270/1045 MHz GPU Temperature: 44 C - 64 C

I initially set out to spend about $800 on a new laptop--something with a newer generation processor. After looking in the store at Best Buy, I had my mind set upon a Vaio with an I3. Further research online led me to an even better machine, this one, that had the I5 with TurboBoost and also Bluray. The Bluray is a $50 option on the Sony machines--likely to encourage BD disc sales. To have a very portable BD player that is $60-$70 less than a standard model is key. Dell was not even close on price for a comparable machine. Kudos to Sony for this one. It was also nice not to have an enormous amount of factory-added software to contend with as well. It didn't take long to set it up to my tastes. On the OS side, I've been using Windows 7 for quite a while on my desktop and now the new laptop and it is phenomenal. If you're looking for a swift, reasonably future-proof machine for about a grand, I challenge you to find a better deal. I highly recommend to any future buyer.

I have this laptop for about a week now. I would say all the reviews are fairly accurate about this laptop. The graphic card is good, i play Call of Duty 4 with all the options on, No problem, I'm a photographer, picture and video editing is done smoothly. Sound not so good and yes finger prints all over the place but that shouldn't keep you for not buying this laptop. My only complain comes from this noisy computer. You can hear a high pitch processing noise coming from inside of the laptop, which it gets annoying if you sitting at your desk alone in a room, and the fan noise and some distortion sound from speakers when the computer is plugged into electricity. The noise sound doubles when the computer running on the battery. Other than that, this is great computer for the price, its a shame that has minor flaws.

This laptop is pretty great, it plays games and runs fast when coding. The screen resolution is nice as well for a 14 inch laptop. The CW community is great and alot of questions/answers can be found here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=5932976 The processor does run at the 2.93 ghz only when it needs to. It runs at the 2.4 ghz when the computer does not need the speed boost. I've been streaming videos to my tv from the laptop for almost the duration of owning this thing, and as this is my first laptop with an hdmi out the quality looks amazing to me. The one thing that really turns me off is the glossy case and palm rest. Fingerprints are ever present on these things. There also doesn't seem to be a screen protector available for purchase anywhere for this laptop.

Overall I'm very pleased so far. gaming has been a pleasant surprise, seems to play anything i throw at it with ease. Screen is nice, 1600 dpi is nice in a 14 inch screen. sound is terrible, speakers are worthless, especially trying to watch a movie, make sure you invest in a nice pair of headphones. Chick let keyboard is nice too. everything worked well out of the box, i only had to remove minimal bloatware, less that most mfg. I ordered the extended battery vgp-bpl-13, getting about 5 hours on a charge, also this battery lifts the back end of the computer rather than sticking out the back, very nice working angle, highly recommended. Overall package of size, style and specs for the money. best deal right now. the exact same model on Newegg was $200 more. way to go BB.

I've only had the machine for a few hours and I'm impressed with it. It almost performs as well as my desktop but has great features like blu-ray, bluetooth, and plenty of media ports. I'm pleased but I am not looking forward to the phone time with sony tomorrow to discuss the missing software Sony creativity suite). It seems like an odd thing to leave out. Bloatware is expected on store bought machines but Sony loads it down with useless software and links to products most people don't want to buy. It only took about an hour to cipher through the nonsense. Overall it's a great bargain and I definitely would recommend this product. It also made me realize how greasy my fingers are.

I've been shopping for a laptop for a while now. What initially sold me on this one was the high resolution screen. I wanted something small, but I didn't want to sacrifice screen real estate. My wife's 15.6 inch screen on her hp does not even come close to the clarity and resolution of the Sony. This thing runs cool compared to my other laptop and it's silent. I literally can't hear it when it's running 90% of the time. For the price, this can't be beat. All you guys that keep repeating the same old "fingerprint magnet" comment, please give it up. It's only been said 900 times about every laptop with a glossy finish. We get it already.

First thing i did was reformatted the drive and did a fresh install of Windows 7 x64. great hardware, the specs on this laptop are phenomenal. battery lasts about 2 hours. however, the battery meter will report that the battery is draining, even when it's completely shut off. turning the computer off at 100% and turned it on again a few days later, battery meter was at about 50%. however, i still got a full 2.5 hours out of it. very strange and sony better fix it. This may have been a deal breaker for me if i found out this characteristic about this laptop earlier.

I ordered this in the store for in-store pickup. It arrived a couple of days earlier than quoted. Other sellers(online) had this same model for almost $200 MORE than Best Buy was selling it for and they still do. I did exhaustive homework because I do not buy Sony because of the premium price they seem to ask. (The only other Sony product that I have purchased new is a Playstation 3.) The new laptops seem to have very small incremental price adjustments with each added upgrade. Unlike the previous models where the price range was huge, but this was by far the best deal out there and it was a Sony. The machine is very solid. The size is right for travel and the 1600*900 resolution is so much better than the standard 1366*768 on most of the laptops out there. When viewing movies, the screen is beautiful to watch and I can take any movie in my library with me when I go on trips. I actually returned an additional bluray player I had purchased for my home office after I decided to buy this laptop. So for me, that brought the 'price' of this laptop down to $800. However when people see it and I tell people what I have on it they think I paid somewhere between $1500-$2000 for it. Well, it does have the Sony name on it. The HDD that came with it is 500GB. Way too big for my usage so I am going to put in an SSD drive with some of the money I "saved" and that will give me the perfect laptop that will last me for a number of years to come. ( I put a SSD drive in a 11.6" net/notebook and I boot into Windows 7 Ultimate in less than 20 seconds / shut down in about 7 seconds). The video card is an Nvidia GT330M that combined with the CPU makes this a pretty good gaming laptop except probably for CRYSIS but you can probably play about 95%-98% of the games out there. This is the most powerful laptop I have ever owned in terms of relative raw power compared to what else is out there and yet there is no heat issue as the unit runs very cool. A big plus it that I do not have to deal with a mail-order company should anything go wrong regardless of where I am in the country and this is a machine that will last well into the future unless there is some killer-app that I just can't live without that takes an enormous amount of computing power way beyond what this can deliver and I do not forsee that occurring in the next few years. Purchasing this will be a cost-conscience investment you will enjoy for years to come.

I have taken this on business trips a couple of time and really enjoyed how light it was when covering significant territory inside airports. When connecting flights are in separate terminals, the weight of the unit plus the power cord was notably lighter than what I am use to. The keyboard and key layout provided a good responsive feeling. The USB ports are accesible from both sides of the keyboard which is really a nice feature when you have air cards and other devices to work with and having all on one side can create a cramped feeling. The Blu-Ray drive is really a wonderful feature and the laptop allows me to provide excellent qualtiy internet video to my LCD TV in such a simple format.. The monitor itself, is not as vivid as I had hoped for, but the clarity was reasonable and when I was playing HD Videos, the picture quality was better than what I had expected. I originally wanted a Dell with the Blu-Ray but got tired of waiting for them to get a blu-ray drive to work with the studio, so I decided to give this unit a try. The Dell priced similar to this Sony and did not include a Blu-ray drive, so for the money I am very satified with the qualtiy and feel of this unit when compared with the comparable Dell unit.

For the price sold here at Best Buy, you cannot find a better laptop. I've been using one for about 2-3 months and have had no issues. Performance is spectacular, as is the screen resolution. I only have 2 complaints (both of which I knew before I ordered - but at this price, it was so worth it): battery life is only 2-3 hours (mostly due to the dedicated graphics I presume) and the speaker volume could be louder. If you are considering a laptop around the $1000 range, this is a fantastic option.

I'm very knowledgeable about computers. When people first look at the price, they think Sony is overcharging them again. But most people don't compare the actual specs of each computer. They say this Sony is $950. They say to themselves, I could get an HP, Gateway, Toshiba, Dell for less than $700-800. Well if you compare the real specs on this computer, you can see why $950 for this Sony is considered a very good deal. Lets go over the specs first. This laptop has the lastest intel core i5 (the 520M model). That means it's got the 2.4 intel processor with turbo boost up to 2.93. The "cheaper competitors" either have the low end intel core i3 (no turbo boost) or the lower end intel core i5 (430m model which is 2.26 with turbo boost up to 2.53). You are getting a much better processor. The only mobile processors better are the intel core i7 but you are going to pay $200-300 more for the i7 model. I would avoid the i7 720qm model (you can see some models for $1000) because they run on the 45nm chip and kill your battery. The newer i7 models that were released Jan 2010 and run on the 32nm chip will cost you $200-300 more. Next the screen resolution is 1600x900. Most laptops in the 13-15 inch range run a screen resolution of 1366-768 resolution. That means you get to see more on your screen than your average laptop. You are getting the screen resolution of a 17 inch laptop in a 14 inch laptop body. But you save on the weight. This laptop weighs 5.3 pounds. The 17 inch laptops will weigh 7-8 pounds. You get discrete dedicated graphics. The Nvidia 330M is a dedicated graphics chip with 512MB memory. That means games will play better. Videos will encode faster etc. Sure there are better graphics chips for gamers. But those laptops are very expensive. This graphics chips is very good for the average consumer. The keyboard of this sony laptop reminds me of my macbook. The palm rest is so comfortable. I could type foreover and not feel fatigued. Most people ignore the keyboard when purchasing a laptop even though it is one of the main features. The only thing I don't like about this laptop are it's tiny speakers. It's manageable but I've seen laptops with better equipped speakers. But overall, I would recommend this laptop if you budget is in the $800-1000 range. It's got the most features for the buck. When you look that you are getting a better resolution screen, a better intel core i5 (520M) processor, a dedicated graphics Nvidia graphics chip PLUS it has a Blu Ray player and DVD/CD burner. You are getting a lot of laptop for the money. Get this laptop, uninstall some of the crapware Sony had pre-installed (other manufacturers install crapware also so Sony isn't the only guilty party). You will love this laptop. I highly recommend this laptop. It's a very good "mainstream" laptop that should satisfy almost every laptop user. At 5.3 pounds, it's not superlight for the elite travelers. But it's not that heavy. You can move it around easily. And it's got the performance of a desktop replacement in a 5.3 pound body.

I've owned this for a month and a half and it's the best laptop I've owned. The only other laptop really close in value is the Samsung R580, but I like this one more because of the i5-520 CPU. The system runs amazingly cool, unlike my last Sony laptop which would easily burn someone. Speakers are not as bad as everyone says, it's a laptop they're suppose to suck. Battery life has been average-above average. If this laptop was a 13" it would hands down be the best laptop ever made.

I bought this for one main purpose, to play World of Warcraft when I'm on business travel. I was so amazed that there was no lag even when I set the graphic setting to the max. The Blu Ray, Hi Def screen (true wide screen), and the HDMI feature are pretty nice too, I get to watch stuff with a clear visual. Well, that's all I have to say about this product. And if you think my review is not good enough for you, check out the other majority satisfied reviews that are posted.