I own a Vaio Z series laptop. Z46GD to be precise. It was state of the art when I bought it. Read the descriptions and look at the product, they are high chances that you’ll buy it if you can digest the price. They say that you know how good a product and service is when you face some problems with it. I have had one too many with this one to say that the negatives of this product far outweigh the positives.
The good: The specs
- This one is fully loaded (for a 2009/2010 laptop). 64 bit, 2.8 GHz processor, 6 GB RAM and a top end graphic card. To top it all, it was sleek and weighed just 1.5kg. No other laptop we saw packed as much. Other laptops which came close to it by weight, either didn’t have a DVD drive or as much processor speed. The weight was my wife’s first consideration and she instantly fell in love with it. And I shelled out a bomb to procure it.
The bad: Everything else
- Battery: They claim it lasts 5 hours. It definitely doesn’t, there is a hardware switch (which toggles between speed & stamina) to disable the power guzzling graphic card. Even with it turned off it comes nowhere close to 5 hours. The worst part is that the battery deteriorates extremely fast. Within a year of use, I can hardly run the laptop for an hour without connecting it to the power.
- Heat generated: This one does get hot. Very hot. It is probably a mix of the processor and graphics card. Though I have been using it for more than 4 years, I always fear that the cooling fan will give way and it is going to burn a hole on my desk.
- The service: Not only this laptop is extremely costly, it’s extremely costly to get it repaired if you have a problem. The Sony service centre charges Rs.1000/- to even have a look and tell you what the problem is. Not to mention that the service centres are extremely unprofessional. And forget getting any help from the call centres, I called them up multiple times to be told about a non existent service centre and they have no clue on software aspects (more about this later)
- The construction: An absolutely flimsy laptop. You don’t handle it properly, you had it… And that is one of the reasons for these posts.
- When I bought it, I noticed a cloth between the keypad and screen which I promptly took off. Within days, the keypad left a dark line right across the beautiful WXGA screen. I thought it was a dust line and tried removing it with multiple alcoholic screen cleaners without luck. Later when I inquired, the service center guys blandly asked, “why do you think they put a cloth between the keypad and the screen?” Then told me that the line on the screen was the colour of the keyboard which got transferred due to the pressure on the screen when I carried it around closed! Ok, probably my mistake (that’s why you should remove those plastic covers on new things!). I started to adjust looking at a laptop with a black line across.
- Then one fine day, working in a hotel room bed, the laptop slipped and fell off the bed onto a carpeted floor 2 feet down and landed on its right side. It was a relatively soft thud as I tried to grab it while slipping. The result – the bottom of the laptop cracked, the DVD drive and the WiFi button became loose and stopped functioning . A trip to the service station cost me not just those Rs.1000 for the guy to have a look and recommend replacement of the above parts but a lot more to replace the bottom carbon fibre body and DVD drive. One piece of advice, never go for a carbon fibre body on a laptop. It is really flimsy. And DVD drives on Laptop, do they use them anymore!
- Then, 2 weeks back, I sitting on the floor, working with the laptop on my lap. A sudden jerk and the laptop slipped and feel. A fall of less than 1 feet on to the floor. Again a soft thud. This time on the left side and all hell broke loose. The OS froze. Restarting the laptop, I got that unmistakable screeching sound from the hard disk and knew instantly that the HD gave way. My fears got confirmed as I saw, ‘Operating System not found’ or going into the Grub prompt (I run Linux on it most of the time and BTW, forget getting driver support for Sony on Linux).
I knew that all I had to do was replace the hard disk. So went to the service centre to get it changed.
Here is where I got to know that their call centre hadn’t updated their service centre location database. I went looking for a centre which was shut down a few weeks earlier. The next centre, they sent me to, told me that a replacement hard disk of 500GB would cost Rs.5000. I agreed and went to get money for the payment and by the time, I came back, they were installing a hard disk which wasn’t the specs we had agreed (Hitachi, 7200 RPM). I promptly took my computer back and wrote to the Sony guys. It’s been 3 weeks and they are yet to take any action. The service centre I went to demanded Rs.1000 to replace a Rs.3000 hard disk. 33% for a 5 minute job! And he refused to sell me just the hard disk.
This is when I gave up all hope on Sony and decided that it was best that I solve this issue myself.
A 30 minute search on Flipkart and Amazon (I prefer Flipkart by the way) and I placed an order for the hard disk I needed for the laptop. It was delivered in 3 days and I fixed it in 10 minutes. I thought of making a video of it, but there are many on YouTube already. Here is one…
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