Sony VAIO VPC-Z212GX/B 13.1-Inch Laptop (Black)

Sony's VAIO Z-Series laptops are great in a lot of ways: compact, decent battery life, and great for travel work. The area that they fall down, however, is driver support. Sony refuses to let you install generic drivers for their hardware, and does not push out regular updates to keep pace. For example, my video card is an Nvidia, but the Nvidia drivers will not install because Sony has asked them not to allow it. I confirmed this with both Nvidia and Sony support. The video drivers are 2 years old for my card and really hinder the legs of the product.

I would definitely not recommend any Sony product with "custom" hardware that does not allow regular driver updates from the manufacturers.

Got this as a replacement for a macbook air. Wanted something that had the same form factor as the airs but could play some games when I wanted.

Pros:

Small and Light and really fast

Better Screen then Macbook Airs

All the ports you need

PMD for gaming

Cons:

Pricey

Small HD (out of the box only 60ish GB free, use mem cards for storage to help this)

Smudge magnet

Extremely happy with this Laptop, would have given a 5/5 if not for the HD thing.

Buy Sony VAIO VPC-Z212GX/B 13.1-Inch Laptop (Black) Now

Definitely the most powerful little computer available at this time. Best of all, it runs windows 7. Initially bought mac airs... but after several tries, has been running hot and draining batteries faster. According to an apple specialists, it might be because of their new lion operating system.

Read Best Reviews of Sony VAIO VPC-Z212GX/B 13.1-Inch Laptop (Black) Here

The laptop is everything it's advertised to be.

Pros:

FULL 1080 HD SCREEN!

HD webcam

My configuration (default processor and 4gigs RAM) scores a 5.9 on Windows Rating. (RAM was lowest score)

Reboots in under 30 seconds. Seriously.

So light and mobile for on-the-go

So powerful when at home plugged into media drive

Cons:

Touchpad is ok, but unreliable.

Sound is decent, but shallow. Bass is non-existent. But when I need good sound, I'm at home plugged into my TV or I have my headphones in. So it's not so bad.

Want Sony VAIO VPC-Z212GX/B 13.1-Inch Laptop (Black) Discount?

I was looking for a small, lightweight, high performance laptop with a nice screen, backlit keyboard and SSD hard drive. The Sony Z2 delivered and I'm very happy with this premium ultraportable.

Pros

* Gorgeous 1600x900 screen, very bright and crisp.

* Full-voltage, Sandy Bridge i5 processor.

* Excellent battery life, ~4.5 hours with heavy use.

* Only 2.5 pounds!!!

* Dimmable backlit keyboard

* Full size Ethernet, HDMI & VGA ports.

* Boots up in under 20 seconds, programs open instantaneously.

* Speedy 64GB Samsung SSDs in RAID0. Although these drives are only Sata II (3 Gbit/s) this RAID setup is very fast. A 50MB CrystalDiskMark bench delivered 576 MB/s reads and 322 MB/s writes.

Cons

* Speakers are a joke, the laptop sounds like an old alarm clock. Sony includes a pair of noise cancelling earbuds to address this problem, but I'm surprised they put such horrible speakers in their high end laptops.

* Fingerprint magnet

* Small trackpad. Sometimes misses multi-touch gestures.

* Keyboard travel a little shallow

* Major bloatware! 116 processes and 46% of RAM running out of the box. I disabled all Sony and unnecessary programs/services from starting and I'm down to 67 processes and 29% RAM after booting into Windows.

Windows Experience Index

Processor 6.9

Memory 5.9

Graphics 5.7

Gaming graphics 6.2

Primary hard disk 7.8

I've had the laptop for three months and I'm very happy with it. I considered the Samsung Series 9, ASUS Zenbook and the Apple MacBook Air, but neither one had all the features I wanted. Not to mention they all use low-voltage processors. The performance of this laptop is on par or better than many high-end 15" laptops and it's only 2.5 pounds! If you can live with sub-par speakers I would recommend this laptop.