Sony Vaio "Mini" Laptop

[daepp]

What's the consensus on the little Sonly Laptop? Any experience pro or con? I am in the market for a small laptop - mostly for surfing the net when not at home. Any real life info would be appreciated.

[masraum]

A friend of my wife's has one that's probably 4-5 years old. It's very small (10 or 11" screen), full featured, and runs well. They aren't cheap.

We bought my wife a similarly sized "Averatec" laptop from Sams (11 or 12" screen). It also runs very well, has a built in DVD player (unlike her friends Sony), and was 1/3 the price. My wife's is probably 3-4 years old.

[Tim Walsh]

No idea about the Vaio, but when it comes to small laptops, I've got an Asus EEE PC which is as small as they come. I would try and scrounge up a copy at a brick and morter store to try out first before ordering online, due to the keyboard size. Some of these small laptops have VERY small keyboards, and if you do alot of touch typing it can be a real pain. My wife doesn't like my laptop, but after an hour or so of typing I got used to the keyboard and love the thing.

[campbellcj]

Ditto re. the keyboard. Try one out before you buy if possible. I had (actually still have) an early 2000's Vaio 'subnotebook' and it was a very good machine for basic email/web/word processing kind of stuff and VERY portable -- as long as you could utilize the keyboard adequately. It still works but is slow in modern terms and runs Windows 2000 so I don't use it anymore.

One thing I really dislike about many of these tiny units is the lack of optical DVD/CD drive. It makes loading software more of a hassle but more significantly you can't burn or watch discs without carrying an extra plug-in doo-dad everywhere. That said I am positive my next laptop will be a smaller form factor than my current 15.4" widescreen Thinkpad monster.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by campbellcj

One thing I really dislike about many of these tiny units is the lack of optical DVD/CD drive.

Like I said, my wife's computer came with one built in.

http://www.averatec.com/products/portable/featherlight/1100Series.asp

# ntel® Pentium® M Processor Ultra Low Voltage 733 CPU
# Genuine Windows® XP Professional
# 1.1GHz, 400 MHz Front Side Bus, 2MB L2 Cache
# 10.6" WXGA Display Supporting up to 1280x768 Hi-def Resolution
# 1GB System RAM Upgradeable to 2GB
# 80GB Hard Drive
# Intel® Extreme Graphics 2 Technology with up to 128MB of shared memory
# Dual Layer DVD Burner
# Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200GB
# 4-in-1 Media Card Reader
# Type II PCMCIA/CardBus Slot

I can't find one for sale online, but I'm sure someone makes a comparable unit these days.

[TechnoViking]

My company uses IBM laptops. My experience has been that the small ones (X series) seem to have more reliability problems. I had a couple of them fail completely and I went back to the "standard" size (T series).

If I were to buy a small one with my own money, I'd make sure it had a warranty. And I'd back it up a lot.

Of course, this is based just on my experience. I imagine somebody has published reliability info on these things.

[onewhippedpuppy]

Another vote to try the keyboard. On a regular keyboard I'm a fairly quick typer, but put me on a small laptop and I turn into bumbling fool. The damn keys are so small and so closely spaced that I end up pecking with one finger. Plus, I hate the little screens. Hell, my laptop has a 15.4" screen but I still hook it up to the TV to watch Top Gear.