Sony VAIO PCG- FX501
Battery Life
Ease of Use
Screen Quality
Sony VAIO PCG- FX501
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User Reviews
Value For Money
Ease of Use
Screen Quality
This Laptop Cost Me £2,000 Pounds, And I Wil
This laptop cost me £2,000 pounds, and I will be taking action to get a full refund from Sony. Dont recommend this laptop!
Value For Money
Ease of Use
Screen Quality
Battery Life
Have Been Using My Sony Pcg Fx-501 Now For Nearly
Have been using my Sony PCG FX-501 now for nearly 2 years now with Windows XP Pro and have no problems what so ever,it has been a great Laptop which has been all around the world on my travels, everything works perfect apart from the Touchpad which has been ok but when you are scrolling down pages and you keep your finger on the pad the page will not scroll down like other laptops I have had. Even the battery keeps a good 2 hour use and its 2 years old now. Derek.
Value For Money
Been Using The Sony Pcg Fx501 For Just Over A Year
Been using the Sony PCG FX501 for just over a year now.
Not impressed by SONY customer service.
When we first bought this the cd drives were not recognised by windows and would not show in explorer. Hardly a great start (especially as most of the manuals were on CD!). It took some tweaking to get them up and running - god help beginners.
The paper guides supplied were pretty useless - we had to guess what a couple of the supplied leads did.
Once it was up and running all was fine.
Only major problem was our own fault - food got into the keyboard and part of the motherboard causing part of the keyboard to fail.
To clean the motherboard and replace the keyboard would not have taken too long but 12 weeks and £450 (half the cost of the computer) later we got it back. It had to go to their repair centre in France! I could not find any alternative independant repair centres on the web. I guess sony keep their parts to themselves.
We shouldnt have broken it but I cant help thinking that if it had been a Dell or Toshiba the repairs could have been locally and much cheaper.
Sony lives up to its reputation of making great looking stuff but god help you if it goes wrong.
Value For Money
For The Money The Pcg-fx501 Is An Adequate First F
For the money the pcg-fx501 is an adequate first foray into the world of laptops ,it is let down by a dodgy touchpad that has the screen pointer sometimes doing its own thing. Also I tried to get a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card working but ,to no avail ,even after upgrading to XP sp1.Things must also get hot inside as the fan never lets up ,better than a fried processor I suppose!.
Unfortunatley ,I think their web site is a bit long winded to find what you want and seems to have given up catering for this model.
Value For Money
I Needed A Laptop For Work, And I Had Previous Exp
I needed a laptop for work, and I had previous experience of Sony Vaios. In order to convince my boss that this PCG FX501 was the one to go for, I did a comprehensive study of all competitors I could find and found that the FX501 was the best laptop at the price by a mile. You can get a cheaper laptop, but you compromise on screen size, memory or using Windows 98.
The first one I got had the keyboard/touchpad/battery problem, and was sent back. The replacement I got did not have the issue. I have since learned that Sony issued a BIOS update that allegedly addresses this issue. I was not having a problem with the replacement unit, but I've installed it anyway.
The first thing I did when I got down to work was to get rid of all the eye candy and automatic things that go on behind your back under Windows XP. This is not Sony's fault, but perhaps they could offer to do this for you. Apart from the skinning and font smoothing, I have this running pretty much like Windows 2000.
One niggle is that Sony only supply with Windows XP Home. It would have been nice to have the option of Professional.
The screen is wonderful - 14.1", pin sharp and bright. I was happy to see the amount of expansion options - 2 PCMCIA slots, Firewire, 2 USB, TV and VGA out, network and modem built in. Performance is good, well up for everything I ask it to do. Hard drive space is ample at 20Gb without being generous. Having a DVD drive at this price is wonderful.
My gripes would be the onboard sound being of merely adequate quality. The TV-out is composite only, s-video would have been nice and not too difficult to put in, as the video is an ATi solution, well renowned for TV-out solutions. Only supplying Windows XP Home is a little short sighted. The defect on the first one I got was annoying but dealt with swiftly through the retailer.
To sum up, this laptop is probably the best all round value at this price range, having a sensible blend of features, and not many compromises. I would recommend this laptop to anyone looking for a desktop replacement for occasional travelling.
Value For Money
My Sony Pcg Fx501 Laptop Came Complete With Faulty
My Sony PCG FX501 Laptop came complete with faulty BIOS which meant there was an intermittent problem with the keyboard and the trackpad, making both unusable. Sony made no attempt to contact their customers about this fault they were well aware of. The fix was however obtainable from the website. The instructions were however riddled with errors and with grim warnings that if you followed the 40 step instructions wrongly you could destroy the computer and Sony would take no responsibility. Finally seem to have fixed the machine.
Now it is working it's quite nice but a bit noisy.
Also, the registration process was very annoying as it is impossible to complete the process without answering a huge number of "marketing" type questions - surely this isn't allowed.
Overall I am shocked by the customer service and receiving such a shoddy product when I bought Sony in the expectation of high quality and reliability.
Based on my experience I would never buy from Sony again.
To update on my previous comment, when I sent the laptop back to Sony to get the keyboard/touchpad problem fixed, the laptop was returned to me but the problem was not fixed. In fact, the problem, which was intermittant, was now permanent and an additional problem cropped up too. The laptop kept telling me the wrong information about the battery life. It had to be taken back to Belgium again. If you want a laptop that works first time round, don't buy Sony.
where do i start? i have had problem after problem with sony, the only reason i bought a sony vaio pcg fx501 was becouse it said on the sony website i can upgrade the memory to 512mb.
it said it had one slot of 256mb sd ram and one free slot to put in another slot of ram. two months later i got a price for a memory upgrade from a local shop, which i could afford so i took my laptop to the shop. when the guy opened it there was 2 128mb sd ram, i could not afford two 256mb slots so i went away empty handed and phoned sony. they said that they do send out some with 2 128mbs and it did say that on the website. i went back to the website and it had changed saying some do have 2 128mb (what is the bloody point of makeing it upgradeable if you have to buy 2 256mbs of ram to do it? it would work out cheaper buying a laptop already with 512mbs)so i phoned sony again asking if it would be possable to have a swap of the 2 128mbs for 1 256mb? they said they would ask the engineers and phone me back. two weeks later no one phoned so i phoned them and they said they will not do a swap becouse they did not have to. after 10 months of phoneing sony with small problems i tryed watching a dvd, something i only tryed the first time i got it which worked fine. but this time it did not. so i phoned sony who said that i would have to pay £12.00 before i can even ask a question becouse it is 3 weeks out of warenty (when i checked my credit card statment the had taken £12.50)they said that they would have to collect it for repair but i would have to pay for the trasport
( to france at a cost of £37.00) when they phoned me they said that the dvd drive needed replaceing and that they found other problems
like the porcessoer had been in contact with water and needed replaceing the cooling fan was dirty and needed replaceing the mouse needed replaceing and so did the keybored. the total price for repair is £555.00 which i can not afford so i asked them to send it back, i did ask again if they would change the memory, and they actually did. when i got it back i asked
a frend ( a electronics engineer) to see if he could do anything with it. he said there was nothing wrong with the processor, he cleaned the fan and it worked fine the keybored looked as if something had been spilt on it but it worked fine same for the mouse. the only thing not working was the dvd drive. he asked me to phone sony to order a new dvd drive and he would fit it, but sony do not sell parts for most of the laptop, so the only way i can get it fixed is to pay sony £280 to do what a frend can do for a 10th of the price. i have had more problems but i am now tired of typing. i now work in computers and i am NEVER going to buy a sony computer again in my life and i will recomend to anyone i work with or for to stay away from sony i have tryed to register with e support but keep getting error 404 i have phoned sony so many times about it who say they will sort it,
but after 14 months i have just given up
i also bought a pcg-fx501 in the expectation of sony being a top make. having suffered the keyboard and touchpad problems (alot) , installed the BIOS correction (without any sympathy or cooperation from the retailer whatsoever), the problem still rears its head 1 - 2 times per month rendering the machine unusable.
Without doubt will NEVER buy sony again.
I also bought this model and suffered fromt he keyboard and touchpad error. The fix was on the Vaio Link website - which was the first place I went to for help so I was pleased that they had the bios upgrade on there.
However, the bios upgrade didn't fix the problem. Sony's response when I rang them was to offer to pick it up, take it away for 7-10 days and fix the problem. This is unacceptable as I work away from home and bought the laptop to do important work for these few months that I need it. A loss of 7-10 working days at a time when I need the laptop the most is not good enough.
I'm now going to call the retailer to see if I can get a replacement from them or a refund so that I can buy another make.
I am disappointed that Sony are selling a product that requires a back-to-base service immediately after purchase. This model should be withdrawn from sale and the problems resolved before the customer spends a grand on a piece of faulty hardware.
I'm sorry that you were so put off by the problem. I also suffered this problem, but through my retailer I got it swapped out in a few days. Unfortunately, I think you have allowed your unfortunate experience to colour your judgement excessively. You cannot argue with the value for money of this machine. The performance is respectable. The screen is great. Expandability is good.
I think your ratings were excessively harsh.
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