new sony vaio

Anna’s old Dell laptop stopped working over the weekend. Back in November, I had replaced a faulty motherboard in it with one I bought from eBay. I thought after that episode that we would get another couple of years out of it, but it seems I was wrong.  The monitor died, leaving us with a machine that boots up and works, but can’t be seen.  I checked the cables and there were no obvious breakages, so the problem was in something that I couldn’t easily diagnose.  I know that the graphics system is still working as it functions perfectly when plugged into an external monitor. There was no picture from the screen though, so I figured we’d get a replacement (eBay again, this is a very nice chassis for a 12.1” sub-notebook). Unfortunately the cheapest screen I could find on ebay was almost 400€, which was almost the price of some new laptops.

So, we looked around the web to find her a cheap laptop. Something cheap, which basically functioned as a player for downloaded TV programs.  I had a couple of pre-requisites that I wanted filled too.  It had to run Vista, and run it well. I wanted the build quality to be good enough that it would last for several years.  This also meant that it would need to be as powerful as possible within the budget we had set.  I took a look at some Dell machines, and we had almost settled on one of their Inspirons, with a pretty design for the lid.  Then by chance I took a look at Sony.de to see what kind of prices they were offering.  Sonys are typically much more expensive than Dells, and that price increase is reflected in the build quality of the machines.  I have one, you’ve either seen it or read about it, and I love it.

In all my years in AOL I played with a great deal of laptops.  They were typically loan machines from the different OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer) which we used to test with AOL.  I’ve been through Medion, Dell, Compaq and HP, Toshiba, Lenovo (IBM), Fujitsu and Sony.  By far the Sony’s impressed me more than any other vendors.  There’s something about the quality of the hardware that you don’t get anywhere else.  Its maybe not a fair rule to apply to a purchasing decision, but it has worked for me so far.

So, we bought her a new Sony Vaio. In the vein of that first post, here’s the specs :

I think this will work out for another five years, which is about how long she had the Dell!  Anna of course has a problem with that, wondering why they can’t last forever.  That’s the fundamental difference between us I guess, these are all ephemera to me. I’ll get some more details on it later in the week.  In typical Sony fashion, it will be bogged down with bloatware and need formatting as soon as I create the rescue discs.