OK. Get ready. Because I *really* love this laptop. In fact, in regards to the previous story about swapping men for gadgets, should the situation ever arise, I'd swap any man for this laptop.
First up, you should know the most important thing. It provokes really envious glances, which you can see reflected in the ultra bright screen. Which in this case, is a good thing. It's mainly because it's so damn tiny, measuring 272mm wide and 195mm deep. Weighing just 1.25 kg it's also the first laptop that I could fit in my normal sized handbag, rather than the oversized laptop bag I usually carry. In fact, the first time I took it out in that laptop bag, I lost it in the depths. I kid you not.
Performance wise, it works surprisingly well for one so small. It packs Intel's Core Solo processor, which runs at 1.06GHz and is supported by 512MB of Ram, and didn't slow down at any point despite running numerous applications at the same time. Saying that, mine were mainly office and editing jobs, so gaming on it would be a whole other ball game (but it's not really a gaming laptop). It had no problem playing movies either, although I had to download a 3rd party app to play my Region 0 DVD. The battery life is also superb - I had it running for about 7 hours before it finally conked out.
The features go thus: It's got two memory card slots, for an SD card and a Memory Stick Pro, and two USB ports. There are six buttons positioned on the hinge, which control the basic functions of the DVD player. The only problem I came across with the overall build of it was the mouse pad. Because it's small, it's right underneath the keyboard, which meant that any resting of the hands on the space below whilst typing, quite often resulted in my moving the cursor about. Several emails were accidentally sent before I'd finished, although luckily none too incriminating. The hard drive (80GB) is protected by the G-Sensor Shock Protection system, which detects sudden movement and cushions the drive. This is really important, as I found that because it's so lightweight, I tended to fling it about without a second thought (sorry Sony).
And so, it's clear that the compactness and the lightweight are the Vaio's TX3's greatest selling point, but also its weakness. The screen is 11", and I found that with my poor mole-vision eye sight there were times when I had to get really close to the screen in order to see it properly. But what do you expect from an Ultraportable?
Overall, if it were my choice, I'd trade in every piece of kit I own for this laptop. Sadly, that isn't the deal, so I'm going to have to save up the £1,500 to get myself one. Oh yes, did I not mention that? It's £1,500. Maybe I'll just hire a monkey to follow me round with my 7kg laptop for £3 a day.
Product page: Sony
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"It had no problem playing movies either, although I had to download a 3rd party app to play my Region 0 DVD."
could you please show me this app? I've tried a lot of but still could not make it regionfree
thanx