Sony VAIO PCG- FX501

This laptop cost me £2,000 pounds, and I will be taking action to get a full refund from Sony. Dont recommend this laptop!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.