My new laptop arrived three days ago, as an early Christmas gift. (-: ROTFL %-) I excitedly turned on the machine and surveyed the features.
Price: The Sony VAIO VGN-S260 cost about $1640 after a $100 mail-in rebate, which is relatively inexpensive for a thin-and-light with these features, although there are a few cheaper ones around.
Design: At only 4.2 pounds, I can carry this laptop anywhere. The design is thin and sleek, as with the rest of Sony’s VAIO line of computers. Even though it’s thin, the laptop still felt extremely sturdy.
Display: The display is reflective and uses XBRITE technology and is easy to see. Glare isn’t a problem indoors, but it could be a distraction under sunlight.
Proccessor: The processor is a 1.70GHz Pentium M processor that can be underclocked to 600MHz to conserve battery life. Generally, it doesn’t feel slow when underclocked, although you might notice that some of the Windows eye candy/animations will be sluggish.
Battery Life: The battery life is supposed to be 6.5 hours with all power-saving features turned on. I haven’t completely used all the battery power without plugging it back in yet, although I estimate I could get approximately 4 hours out of a single charge with the wireless adapter on and most power-saving features enabled.
Keyboard: The keyboard is nice and big, and the Ctrl key is in the right place so keyboard shortcuts are easy to use. The keystroke depth is relatively shallow (2mm) but still provides enough feedback to be easy to type with. The keyboard seems pretty solid, and I haven’t experienced any noticeable flex, and it feels like all the keys are distinct and separate from each other. There are two convenient, user-programmable buttons at the top labelled S1 and S2. A disadvantage of the keyboard layout is that the Home, PgUp, PgDn, and End keys are linked with the Fn key so you can’t easily scroll through a document one-handedly.
Touch Pad: The touch pad is a nice, wide one and scrolling using the sides can be set up using the utility provided, which is a really nice feature. Underneath it are two shiny, chrome buttons which fingerprint easily and seemed too stiff at first, but after actual use I’ve found that they aren’t too hard to press.
Recovery Software!!!: The only real complaint I have about this laptop is that it doesn’t include a hard disk recovery DVD. Really–it wouldn’t even cost $2, yet Sony refuses to include it with the laptop. They tell you to make either a DVD or 6 CD-R’s yourself. Since it doesn’t include a DVD burner, you’re forced to use 6 CD-R’s! If the burn process fails (which it did during the 5th disc!), you have to start all over again, from the very first disc. This makes it incredibly difficult to get a clean install of XP on the computer. You can download most, but not all, utilities and drivers from the Sony website. You can’t download their power management utility or hotkey driver, though, and without these things battery life is short and the user-programmable buttons are useless. Fortunately, I managed to read the recovery data off the hidden partition and copy it away, so I could install some of the bundled applications and utilities on my clean install of XP.
Overall: The Sony VAIO VGN-S260 is still an excellent computer , and I would recommend it to anyone who wants a reliable, high-quality thin-and-light laptop.
(edit 10/9/2005) I named this computer midnight a while ago.