I have had this laptop for over 6 months now, and i still feel its one of the best laptops to date. Most people might think this model is discountinued. But actually sony has repositioned it in the market as B Series, targeting business laptop market.
The Z1 is incredible in terms of looks - the metallic finish, the tappered down front, the latch less screen and the black keyboard all spell beauty.
I really like the brightness in this screen. SVGA+ makes a lot of difference. The colors on this screen are much better than the V505. Z series doesn't have the glossy screens you see in S, K or A series now (which I am not a big fan of). But the brigtness is comparable.
But the Z1 is not just a pretty face. I have tired the V505, S260 and K33 laptops from sony. The Z1 and S1 have the best keyboad feel and the right size too, which is very important for a laptop. The touchpad hasn't given me any problems till date. The touch pad is a lot more smoother than V505 and K33.
The Z1 is not top of the line in performance. But I can comfortably run Visual studio.Net or Adobe Photoshop on this. Perfect for software folks on the run, like me.
ATI 16MB card has more punch than i expected. I had no hiccups running the NFS Underground demo too.
Cons:
The Bluetooth software that came with this laptop was not quite usefull. It could not talk to my Nokia 3650 or my Jabra 250 BT. Dont count on buying a bluetooth mouse either.
You are bound the hit the touch pad while typing and you might endup typing else where. Thats sometimes annoying. But it should be ok once you get a little used to it.
Want to upgrade the memory? It would be a nightmare, if you want to do it yourself. In most laptops its as easy as removing a screw. But not in this one. There is a 15 step procedure in the internet, which includes pealing the keyboard. Good luck!
I still can't figure out what half of the sony softwares are for. Why do i need a media server software on my laptop?
Overall I am very happy with this purchase. |
| While it's true that the Z1WA does not come with a recovery CD, and that Sony will supply you one for $25, it comes with a utility to create your own set of (9) recovery CDs. Unfortunately, the utility to make them is a little brain-damaged. It's supposed to keep a taskbar icon available until you create a set, but looking at it and cancelling makes it go away. Looking and cancelling is also enough to make it force you to reboot with no way to avoid it (beyond letting the "OK to Reboot" dialog languish in the background). It'd be more convenient, for sure, if Sony just spent the $2 to include a set of recovery CDs, but you don't have to spend $25 if you don't want to. One of my main complaints so far is that the filesystem as shipped is horribly fragmented, making the computer quite slow. Make sure you defrag as soon as possible. It speeds up the computer tremendously. Again, I'm surprised Sony didn't fix this in the factory. Another complaint is the keyboard. The keys are quite flat and a little hard to touch-type on. Also, the right shift key is the same size as a regular letter key, making it hard to use. Sony should have made the arrow keys smaller and extended the shift to be a double-wide key as it should be, but that's moot now. Also, it comes with C: (14GB) and D: (37GB) drives from the factory, which seems silly. I suppose it might make it easier to recover, but I haven't tried that yet. But it'd make more sense to me to have the one hard drive have only one letter so that you had only one chance to run out of drive space, not two. Also, it does come with a lot of utilities that aren't the most helpful. Norton Internet Security seems like too much of a mother hen. Norton Anti-Virus is a 3-month trial, as is Office. I'm sure there are more of these utilities that are doing nothing more than wasting drive space, but I've only had it for about 12 hours now. The lid can be a little hard to open, too, especially with one hand. There's no latch, just a spring holding it closed and it's a litte tight. It might loosen up with use, though. Having ClearType font smoothing on as default would probably have made sense, too, but it wasn't. Other than these quibbles, though, I'm quite happy with the computer. It's quite light, has a nice high-resolution screen (which others with worse sight might find a detriment), looks sexy (especially after you take off the at least six stickers), and performs well. I'm happy. |
.jpg)
