December 16th, 2007

Sony VAIO VGC-LS30E User Reviews

Category: Sony, Popularity: 9% [?]

(No Ratings Yet)

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By M. Gerrish “miamimeg” (Miami, FL USA)

This is a very pretty machine. The picture quality is five-star. It comfortably fills that niche between desktop and laptop — small footprint that I wouldn’t take on a plane, but I would take into another room on a whim.

I lost several wires and power connections by switching from an ordinary desktop tower to this piece. Naturally, losing the mouse, keyboard and modem connections tidied things up, but losing the monitor and speaker power and connection cords, too, really untangled a frightening web under my desk.

In spite of remarks from others about the lack of documentation, the included power cord obviously only connects in one place and the Start Up diagram makes it obvious. That Start Up sheet is also clear about the order to proceed during first-time set-up. If you’ve ever used a computer or NEVER used a computer, this will NOT feel like a rocket science degree will be necessary. Once connected, the Help file will fill in any gap you’re suffering.

I was already familiar with Vista Home Premium, so the learning curve was negligible and the authorization was completely painless. And to counter another reviewer’s experience, ALL of my Adobe software works just fine.

My mistake and not the fault of the machine — I uninstalled all of the pre-loaded trial software before installing my own software discs and that created issues — I shouldn’t have unloaded the trial Quicken and tried to install my old Quicken version. Didn’t happen. And I screwed up something by unloading the RealPlayer. If you run into trouble, just browse Yahoo or Google and you’ll find the answer on someone’s forum.

Nice machine. I might get annoyed about the wireless, potentially battery hungry keyboard and mouse at some point, but after hours and hours of use, not so far. And the keyboard is shockingly comfortable — I didn’t believe it would be.

I enjoy it. This computer costs less than any system I have ever bought (I’m not a gamer) since the 1980s, yet runs better and looks better than any of them. If I run into anything ugly, I’ll report back.

By Stevan Rosenlind “lookoutpi” (Cambria CA USA)

I have had this computer for a month now. There has been quite a learning curve because of this new computer and going from XP to Vista then to Vista Ultimate. (The lack of documentation with the VGC LS-37e has already been addressed in another review.)

This machine ran competently out of the box, but I have spent weeks ironing out the kinks from the Vista Ultimate install that I did after about two weeks. Including a day with MS support trying to find out why the speakers shut down after the install (huge driver problems with Vista). But at least MS techs helped me solve the problem. Sony techs were so useless that I wanted to slap them. (I also have had horrendous problems with Office 2007 but that too is more related to vista then sony.} I’m also already experiencing problems with the dvd drive (it’s noise level has doubled in the last week, not a good sign.)

After weeks of tweaking, I have got the machine to rate 3.4 on Windows Experience Index (it came out of the box at 3.2). This rating is a pretty accurate assessment of this machine’s overall abilities and capabilities (MS uses a 1.0 to 5.9 rating system that looks at 5 performance categories). The good here is that the hard drive rates 5.7 and the processor rates 4.5, both pretty good scores. But the graphics components really drag the rating down and this shows up in the minute by minute performance.

So, here’s my thoughts and recommendations at this point:
1. Use the VISTA boost speed for sure.
2. Don’t count on Sony support for anything. They are so useless it is pointless to even comment on them.
3. Don’t upgrade to Ultimate unless you are at least intermediate level computer user.
4. Avoid all things Adobe (this machine just does not like adobe).
5. Don’t add intensive game or graphics software because this machine just won’t take to it.

Finally, this machine is really of triumph of style over performance. I’m keeping it. But I probably could have gotten something better for my money and I won’t buy another one.