Sony VAIO VPCSA23GX/SI 13.3" LED Notebook - Intel Core i5 i5-2410M 2.30 GHz - Silver

Unavailable on Amazon, purchased directly from Sony website for less than $1400 for the fastest dual-core i7 laptop from reliable manufacturer is a true bargain. Once upgraded to 8GB RAM for less than $30 and 2nd generation 512GB SSD for less than $800 it outperforms most of machines in its class. I use it mostly for off-line video processing where it superseded my old Lenovo T61 notebook (T7500) showing quadrupled performance. USB 3.0 works flawlessly finally allowing me to use new high-tech video converters, editing decks and HD camcorders. Do not bother with customizing machines which cost enormous leg. This is best buy for the buck, period. Highly recommended.

I bought this from an Amazon affiliate. It is light weight and has very high resolution (1600x900). The hardware spec also looks decent(i5, SSD, backlite keyboard). But there are a lot of issues. First, the touch pad is very poor. It is not sensitive and responsive. I have to use a mouse or it is very frustraing. It does not have multi-touch features like HP/Lenovo. Second, the performance is very poor even though it has the SSD and has a 2.4MHz i5. Just web browsing can observe lag from time to time. Third, the spec said 120GB capacity for SSD. But 20GB is reserved for recovery. And you will notice that 100GB is used up very quickly by Window and Office. The storage is not enough. Fourth, the battery life is very poor even though it uses SSD. The web site said 15 hours if you combine with a sheet battery. Without the sheet battery, it barely reaches 4 hours with best power saving configuration and light activity in my experiment. Fifth, it can switch between external graphics chip and internal graphics chip to choose between performance and battery life. It sounds good. but in many cases, it does not let you switch because "some applications are using the old graphics configuration". To close all the applications may not fix that issue. I have to reboot the machine in order to switch to another graphics mode. This defeats the purpose of dual graphics modes. Sixth the system is loaded with a lot of VAIO software. 4GB memory is not enough. I have to buy additional memory. Some of the VAIO software may run out of control in the background and use 100% of CPU. I have to manually kill those ill processes. Seventh, in one case I upgrade the software via their VAIO Care. It ends up that I cannot boot the machine anymore and I need to restore the machine. Eighth, the fan can be turned on very often and it is very noisy. I expect a $1000 laptop doing better than that. It is much worse than my Lenovo Thinkpad T/X series and HP DV4. I won't buy another VAIO. It sucks.

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