Sony Vaio La38s

[JAS21]

Has anyone bought or know much about the new Sony VAIO LA38S. I walked into the local Sony shop to enquire about the price and actually see them setting one up for a customer, well actually downloading/making a recovery disk.

It appears that you don’t get a Visa re-install disk. Is that the usual case in Thailand..I’m frequently re-installing XP to keep the my laptop running at a reasonable speed.

The shop are offering at 74,000 Baht..they say normal price is 80K. They offer a two year warranty and if I understood correctly sort any problems out for you

I have been looking to replace my laptop ever since I came to live here. I also want it to look nice on the desk..sorry not a very technical reason to buy!!!

Am I likely to be able to get one cheaper from say HK, China or Singapore. Maybe good idea to buy here though and have the local shop backup.

I need MS Office, how much am I likely to have to pay for that or could I installl the copy which is at present on my laptop. Its the XP version...guess answer is no.

All opinions please.

[paveet]

Has anyone bought or know much about the new Sony VAIO LA38S. I walked into the local Sony shop to enquire about the price and actually see them setting one up for a customer, well actually downloading/making a recovery disk.

It appears that you don't get a Visa re-install disk. Is that the usual case in Thailand..I'm frequently re-installing XP to keep the my laptop running at a reasonable speed.

The shop are offering at 74,000 Baht..they say normal price is 80K. They offer a two year warranty and if I understood correctly sort any problems out for you

I have been looking to replace my laptop ever since I came to live here. I also want it to look nice on the desk..sorry not a very technical reason to buy!!!

Am I likely to be able to get one cheaper from say HK, China or Singapore. Maybe good idea to buy here though and have the local shop backup.

I need MS Office, how much am I likely to have to pay for that or could I installl the copy which is at present on my laptop. Its the XP version...guess answer is no.

All opinions please.

I don't know about the Sony laptop itself. However, I have purchased two laptops in Thailand in the past (Acer C110 and Toshiba M200) and both of them came with Windows XP Recovery CDs.

And yes, Office XP works on Vista just as 2003 and 2007.

Pavee

[A_Traveller]

Depending on the model and manufacturer's policies, systems can come with a recovery partition on the hard disk {usually with a 'run-once' recovery CD's generation program, if machine has disk burner} or separate CDs. Since the former is easier {and cheaper} that has become the prevalent approach.

Regards

[Macx]

I was about to buy a Sony laptop until someone gave me this advice: Google Sony, complaints, warranty.

[LivinLOS]

I think you can do that with any company these days though...

I have heard of Sony being very good.. And they do have a global presence.. I personally have been treated well by acer and toshiba over warrantee items..

I wont ever buy another compaq product..

[hotgeekus]

I have a Sony Viao for about three years now. After one trip to Asia the Hard Drive crashed, I took it out, bought a case, hooked it up, took off all info, burned it onto 2 disks and threw it away and put a new HD in.

Other than that, three years in it is perfect.

It too did not come with a recovery disk. Then when I ran into trouble, I was mad that I never ran the recovery disk creater that pops up everytime I turned it on. So, with a dead laptop and no XP disk I was up poop creek. Then I went to Sony.com and found out you can buy the recovery disks (2) with all software that is pre installed, it cost me $15 US. Everything is on the disk, XP, DVD 1 click, etc.... You don't even have to enter the XP product code as it says it will only work with original VIAO laptop, but I don't know and don't care.

So now, everytime I run into problems (about 1 every 6-9 months) I just reformatt the drive and put XP in clean.

Great computer, great laptop, only negative is that it runs quite hot sometimes (to the touch), but has never affected the operation of the actual machine.

[Firefoxx]

My friend has been a fan of Sony laptops. However, one of his biggest gripes is that you don't get any CDs with the laptop. At all. None. Zero. As in no drivers, no windows, no nothing. He had to order a set from Sony, and this was with a laptop that cost around US$3k, which is a bit ridiculous.

Sonys are of course in the top tier of laptops (along with other Japanese brands like Fujitsu and Toshiba/Panasonic), so their prices are already pretty inflated, but that's what you pay for the brand and the style. Sony products in Thailand are also fairly overpriced in general... I usually save around 30% or more by getting my Sony products from the US. At the time my friend bought his $3k laptop (several years ago), I looked up the price for it here, and it was around $4k. I don't know what the situation is right now.

[Jimmy in Bangkok]

To the question of recovery disks etc nearly all the manufacturers have the no disc policy now and offer you the chance to burn your own at startup. The other bonus is that all that information is stored in a protected partition on your hard drive and you don't need the CD/DVD to actually use the service. You are able to, if in need, set your boot option to the protected partition and it will boot straight into your recovery mode.

Although! If you have changed the formatting of your drive i.e. you have changed your primary partion from FAT32-NTFS you CANNOT boot from the protected recovery partition (well that's not entirely true....you can but you will be stuck in an endless loop due to the different formats) as it won't load due to the formatting of the drive. You have to reformat the drive to whatever the recovery partition was set at originally and then away you go. Obviously changing your boot order back after you're finished. I have done this on my Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi without a hitch and works like a charm.

The data is always there (unless you deliberately wipe or destroy the partition) and it is immediately recognised by GRUB boot loader (Linux) and also Norton's Partition Magic (not sure if that's the name of the Norton one?) and also Acronis. So don't think just because you never made the disk that you can't still use the recovery data on the hard drive. It comes in quite handy. Hope this is of some help to people.

Cheers

Jimmy

[nikster]

I think you can do that with any company these days though...

I have heard of Sony being very good.. And they do have a global presence.. I personally have been treated well by acer and toshiba over warrantee items..

I wont ever buy another compaq product..

IT lore is that Sony has good quality but terrible, horrible, awful service. So if something goes wrong, you are on your own. Not good with laptops as something is bound to go wrong at some point.

Acer Thailand has been excellent in terms of service but their quality of late is questionable.

HP/compaq service is also pretty good, as witnessed by a friend who got his battery replaced even though he was outside his 1 year warranty - he told them that the battery had been bad for a long time, which was true, but still. Bonus points for HP/compaq.

Best quality is ThinkPad, now made by Lenovo.

And anyone who wants the prettiest laptop ever on his desk, you have to buy a MacBook (black). Sorry, nobody can compete with the looks. Or maybe white

A friend just bought a MacBook, I was able to play with it today. And lo and behold, Thailand is the Apple wonderland where you get everything in one:

- MacBook

- OS X

- A Windows XP partition - you can boot into Windows XP any time you like, and the best part is the shop has it all already set up for you!

- Parallels Desktop pre-installed. With this software, you can run any Windows application on your desktop seamlessly. The latest version even hides the Windows desktop and just runs the apps seemingly on top of OS X, and at near-native speed (90%).

So this really is the best of both worlds - you get a rock solid unix foundation with OS X, beautiful hardware, and all windows emulation options you could dream of. For free. TIT for you

I am going to get one as soon as budget considerations (read "the wife") allow

ps: I have had Acers for the past few years, so first hand experience, service center in Chiang Mai is just awesome. The only downside was, I had to use this excellent service a lot.

[JAS21]

Sony doesn't make notebooks. They design them, then get an OEM company to make them.

The best news on Sony is that they finally stopped forcing people to use their horrible DVD writers and started installing MATSHITA drives (Panasonic). Guess complaints paid off.

It's not only Sony that keeps all the recovery files on the hard disk and asks you to make recovery discs yourself. So do most of the others. The only ones I've got Windows CDs and drivers with were Fujitsu S-series, BENQ S-series and one Toshiba, can't remember which model.

It's cheaper for them, and not much hassle for you, unless, of course you have a shining Sony Vaio VGN-A690, at 140,000 baht with a DVD drive that in 1 year wasn't capable of writing even one single disc (of dozens of high end DVD-R brands) that would pass verification... including the recovery discs.

Went to the computer show today. Didn't stay that long as it was full of 'pretty girls' shouting their heads off into microphones..must be getting old..as just found it too noisy

Had a second look at the LA30S..not as impressed as I was at first. Also reading the small print it appears that although its a '2 duo processor' it says it will perform better and run in dual channel mode if you install memory modules of the same capacity into both of the two memory module slots.

This means you need to buy more memory already?

[Firefoxx]

That's strange. The dual channel memory thing usually only applies to desktops, in that you will utilize the dual channel memory only if you have two identical memory modules installed. For notebooks, it's supposed to be that each memory module (SODIMM) is already dual-channel, so you only need a single module for dual channel operation. This makes sense because notebooks usually only have two memory slots, one of which is usually already used by the manufacturer.

The recovery partition thing is great, if you're totally computer savvy. If you're not, I don't see why the manufacturer couldn't just include a 5 cent CD or DVD recovery disc with the computer. It's pretty much forcing you into one mode of operation. Not only that, what if your harddisk fails? My friend is no stranger to computers, yet he had trouble with the Sony recovery partition, so that he had to order the recovery discs. Again, if they have them available, why can't they just include them? Their profit margin is huge compared to third-tier manufacturers.

The Thai term for those nice looking girl presenters is simply "pretty". Good description, since that's just what they are, and nothing else.