Item : B001MS6NOG Customer Reviews Great Machine, do not hesitate and buy it by .. Charlie () The Size is great to work with a program at the same time, to watch a BD movie, and the performace has been great so far (2 months). I really recommend this machine. Nice Specs .. bad experience by .. Anil Raghavan (Stillwater, OK United States) I saw all the good reviews and bought this model. On paper, this laptop is wonderful - full-HD 16.4" LCD, 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 320GB 7200rpm drive, 512MB ATI Radeon 3650, Blu-Ray drive, and 64-bit windows vista. Beautiful. Bootloader Corrupt ... I got it and booted it up, created an Admin account, played with it for a few mins and then let it sit. It hibernated, and then it came back without issues. Played with it again for a few mins and then let it sit while I worked. Got back to it, and it wouldn't boot. The error was that the bootloader file could not be found "boot/bcd". After some frustration, I checked the laptop forums and found that another guy had the same trouble and he suggested pressing F10 while booting and using system restore. I did that, and got it back on track. Will not recognize/play Blu-Ray disks I did not have a Blu-Ray player and so I didn't have a disk right then, but I got one the next day .. wouldn't even recognize that a disk has been inserted, and of course, WinDVD BD won't play a disk the laptop doesn't even "see". I suspected that it was a defective disk, and so rented another one. Same deal - the OS will not even recognize the BD disk. It does however, recognize CDs and DVDs. Go figure! Bloatware Galore Comes with about 20 or so programs that you don't need. The used drive space was about 27 GB without any Vista SP1 or additional updates. A clean install of Vista Ultimate, on the other hand, takes up only 9 GB. You'll have to either live with all that bloatware, or spend about 1 hour+ uninstalling bloatware and rebooting several times. So what did I do? Since I'm a masochist, I'm going to believe in this laptop once more and have ordered a replacement from Amazon. Maybe I got a bad copy. Will update the review (if I can) when I try out the replacement. Thankfully, Amazon customer service was wonderful - they listened to my whining and immediately offered to order a replacement. Really appreciate Amazon for this. A great value by .. Jon R (CT, USA) This is truly a great value for the price, and its from Sony no less (Sony is famous for high priced laptops). Pros: - Price, for the features it pack this is a great deal. - Full HD (1080p, 1900x1080), birght, and a 16:9 aspect ratio meaning you can watch widescreen movies without the bars (some have small bars, but they also show up on my HDTV) and in all their HD glory. It also has an HDMI output show you can watch them on your HDTV. - A Blu-Ray player, a big surprise to find at this price. - A dedicated graphics card. While its not going to play Crysis at high settings it plays most games at medium-high settings. - 7200RPM 300GB HDD, most notebooks at this price only have a 5400RPM drive. Trust me you can notice a difference between 5400RPM and 7200RPM. - 4 GB of memory upgradeable to 8GB. - The speakers don't suck like most notebook speakers do. - Runs quiet and cool. It can get warm near the exhaust when using resource intensive applications, but its to be expected. - Not a lot of bloatware, and some of it was even usefull. - Includes the 64bit edition of Vista. Some complain about Vista, but the 64 bit version combined with SP1 have ironed out most of the problems. Cons: - No numberpad, if they had not gone with the spread out keys keyboard design it could have had one. - Sony only provides Vista drivers, so if you want to use XP its a pain to try to get everything working. This is somewhat eased because I have been told they plan to provide Windows 7 drivers. - The disc drive is a bit on the slow side as far as burning and read speeds go. - It has less bloatware than many notebooks, but there are still a few preinstalled, useless, resource hogging programs that you have to remove. - Vista can be a pain, but this is the fault of Microsoft/Vista not Sony or the notebook. Overall if your in the market for a mobile entertainment/gaming notebook this is a great deal. Simply The Best by .. BBB () :OVERALL: Major props to Sony on this one. This is absolutely THE best laptop you can find for the price. I spent just over $1000 on this and I'm loving it. Honestly, where can you find a powerful computer with 1080p resolution, a dedicated ATI video card, 16.4 inch screen, Blu-Ray player, and 4GB of ram for that little? A Mac with similar specs would cost you $2800! Save yourself the $1800 and buy a Plasma 50 inch TV, or for the down payment on a car, or a week in Hawaii - the list goes on and on. :PROS: (1) Quick computing. I run serious MATLAB and Mathematica modeling programs on this bad boy, and it handles them just fine for a laptop. (2) Runs cool. I've had some previous issues with powerful laptops overheating. This runs VERY quiet and cool. (3) Blu-Ray is gorgeous. (4) Overall Windows Experience Index Number is 5.1 on my machine. (5) Keyboard is wonderfully ergonomic and fits perfectly to my hands. The keys have a great click to them, and don't feel cheap. (6) The touchpad is great. I would rank it higher than any windows based machine I've ever felt and only slightly inferior to Apple's trackpad. (7) Is very sleek and sexy. I think it's the best looking laptop I've ever owned, Macbooks included. Additionally, it is SURPRISINGLY LIGHT. (8) Packaged/included software isn't too obtrusive. (9) Speakers don't suck. (10) Decent battery life, though I don't use this in such a way that it would matter either way. (11) Very respectable boot up time. (12) PRICE! You won't find a similar quality laptop for this price. :CONS: (1) Doesn't include packaged discs with drivers and the OS. You have to create them yourself. Not too difficult. (2) Had to go online and update drivers manually for the Blu-Ray player. IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A QUALITY, POWERFUL LAPTOP WITHOUT SHELLING OUT A COUPLE G's, LOOK NO FURTHER!! Excellent PC replacment by .. M. Garcia (Chicago, IL USA) As others have stated, the Vaio VGN-FW373J/B is a great laptop. Features like the crystal clear hi-def screen, easy to use MacBook-esque keyboard, full 10 key pad, excellent audio performance and many other media features should wow the typical computer user. In our case, we bought the Vaio last December as a replacement for my wife's HP Pavillion laptop which served as the household's primary computer over our wifi network. The Vaio boots up faster, turns off faster and is just loads more powerful than the HP we had. The HP was fine for a couple years, but started to bog down and the power cord had a nagging problem of not working correctly for a few years that finally pushed us to upgrade. There are better technical reviews of this laptop from other users here, so please feel free to read them carefully. But for the typical home user who needs, or wants, to replace their desktop PC or just replace their media based laptop, this Vaio fits the bill perfectly.