Sony TZ
Over the last few years I've owned a lot of laptops from a wide variety of manufacturers, they started as desktop replacements and each one has been smaller and relatively les powerful than the last. Over time I've come to realise what I really want from a laptop is portability rather than a desktop replacement. Following on the trend, I just picked up a Sont TZ.
The TZ is <3lbs with an 11inch wide screen display and a keyboard reminiscent of the iMacs. The processor is a low voltage 1.x GHz Core 2 Duo processor, a Gig of Ram and comes with Vista installed and more crapware than I can even begin to catalogue.
This isn't the first Sony I've owned, so I new the crapware would be there, but I can honestly say that I have never seen a computer as crippled by the installed crapware as the TZ. Out of the box it was as close to unusable as any machine I have ever seen, boot times were horrible, and performance was worse than I could have imagined. I really can't see how none technical users (those who don't understand the crapware issue) would keep the machine given the extremly poor OOB experience.
Several hours of uninstalling software and cleaning crap off the HD later and it was a pretty nice little usable machine. I've Installed 2Gb of RAM and I'm still running Vista, Aero and all. I've never really nticed the night and day prformance difference a lot of people seem to observe runing XP. My observations with Vista are that in general Vista launches apps faster and for the most part in general use and overall performance is basically the same.
Performance is more than adequate for web browsing and Office apps, which is most of what I do on my laptops. I do have Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 installed and although performance isn't comparable to my desktop it's adequate, building one of my work projects it's about half the speed. The primary limiting factor in performance is probably the 4800 rpm 1.8 inch drive, but I wasn't willing to pay the premium for the SSD and there is no 2.5inch drive option in the US.
I really like the form factor, the screen, and the battery life, I've seen an honest 6 hours of use on a battery without charging. But bear in mind that I usually work with minimal screen brightess and no audio.
Build quality is better than the Dells and HP's I've owned but a fair way below that of my IBM.
The SSD card reader seems to be pretty poor with read performance topping out at 2.8MB/s, which makes it useless for readyboost amoung other things. There is no way to tell if this is a hardware restriction or a driver issue, but it doesn't really matter since the net effect is the same.
Overall it's pretty much exactly what I wanted light, with great battery time and adequate performance.
