Sony F Series Notebook SLOW...

[marcplante]

My wife just spent $1300 on one of the new Sony I7 notebooks, and she was utterly disappointed by its performance.

It had 6 G of RAM and a 512MB video card. I found that it booted fairly slowly, which I attributed to the piles of shovelware that it started (and tried to start) on boot up. I used "Tweak" to see what was running, and noted that Sony decided to turn on Bluetooth radios, etc, and there was even a missing application to control the touchpad, which I suppose wasn't even necessary since it appears that Win7 took control.

Has anyone else bought one of the higher end sony F series notebooks? have you had bad experiences with slow boot times?

At this point, my wife ran out of time fiddling with it to speed it up, so she returned it to stay within the return windows since she felt it was a lemon.

If I talk her into buying another, can she expect to recover good performance by stripping out the shovelware? or should I be looking to another brand?

 

[Brainonska511]

I've never really heard good things about Sony laptops. Build quality seems to be okay, but they are loaded to the teeth with crapware.

What does your wife use the computer for? You could probably save a little by going with an i5 notebook instead. Maybe hit up one of the new Vostro 3xxx series from Dell. (The Vostros tend to be solid notebooks). (But don't just look at Dell; plenty of brands to look at - I haven't kept track, but I'm in the initial throws of looking for a new laptop myself).

 

[marcplante]

we over specced the box cause my wife keeps them for 5+ yrs. Another huge factor is the ergonomics. She hates all of the shiny keyboards because of glare and fingerprints. The keyboard requirement alone screened out many computers. She also hates Dell based on past experience. We're going to try one more Sony and have the in-home tech come in and strip out the shovelware to clean things up. I'll let you know how it goes.

 

[GT1999]

Get a dual drived Asus laptop and put a SSD as your boot drive.

 

[Chapbass]

My sony SZ series laptop is a couple years old now, but I found that the internal HDD on it is terrrrrible. Even on a clean OS, not the best thing ever. See if you can save a bit of money somewhere, buy your own hdd (especially if shes on battery most of the time, get a 7200rpm drive).

 

[aj654987]

we over specced the box cause my wife keeps them for 5+ yrs. Another huge factor is the ergonomics. She hates all of the shiny keyboards because of glare and fingerprints. The keyboard requirement alone screened out many computers. She also hates Dell based on past experience. We're going to try one more Sony and have the in-home tech come in and strip out the shovelware to clean things up. I'll let you know how it goes.

Dell does offer a lot of notebooks with the matte (non-glare) screens in their business line so if her budget allows for $1000+ then I think they are worth looking into. Also look into lenovo's business lines. Almost all laptops marketed for general consumers/home use have the shiny screens cause they look nice in the store. I went from a matte screen to one with glare and I hate those screens but my budget was very limited and I needed to upgrade. With a big budget you can find a good laptop with a higher build quality in the business lines from dell or lenovo.

 

[Emulex]

SSD or bust. those 1.8" hard drives are nasty slow.

 

[CurseTheSky]

As others have said, the hard drive is the biggest culprit. Any modern system with a decent (non-Atom) processor, 2+ GB of memory, and an acceptable graphics card will run perfectly fast.

Two things to consider:
- Replace the existing hard drive with a SSD or faster 7200 RPM drive
- Do a fresh format of Windows 7 (not recovery) on the new computer. That way, you install only the software and drivers that YOU want.

 

[Cassian]

I've been using TuneUp utilities since 2007, and I guess it works. You should check it out. You could use the free trial to optimize and if it doesn't work for you, you could always uninstall. Theres a lot of neat tools in that suite such as defragger, registry cleaners, startup manager, etc. But I disable "Live Optimization" and I dont use turbo mode since those features are just gimmicks.

http://www.tune-up.com/products/tuneup-utilities/

Don't do fresh install. Its the biggest waste of time. Anything that Sony preinstalled can be unistalled using W7.

 

[marcplante]

Thanks for all the inputs. I suspect that a notebook with a reasonable SATA HD amd 4G of RAM should perform fine. She's currently using an IDE drive and 1G of RAM on her Toshiba notebook and is OK with the performance, even though that is loaded down with 5 years worth of incremental shovelware.


First thing we're going to try is a fresh notebook to see if there were issues with the software load or hardware spec. It felt like a lemon, as it was slower than my wife's 5 yr old Toshiba. if the next unit is slow, we will have the Sony tech come out for the in home service call to strip out all shovelware. if that doesn't work, we will be returning the notebook, and I'll guild my wife to the pro line for Lenovo, and I'll revisit some of the other pro lines to see if there isn't something else with out a piano gloss keyboard.

 

[Cassian]

Thanks for all the inputs. I suspect that a notebook with a reasonable SATA HD amd 4G of RAM should perform fine. She's currently using an IDE drive and 1G of RAM on her Toshiba notebook and is OK with the performance, even though that is loaded down with 5 years worth of incremental shovelware.


First thing we're going to try is a fresh notebook to see if there were issues with the software load or hardware spec. It felt like a lemon, as it was slower than my wife's 5 yr old Toshiba. if the next unit is slow, we will have the Sony tech come out for the in home service call to strip out all shovelware. if that doesn't work, we will be returning the notebook, and I'll guild my wife to the pro line for Lenovo, and I'll revisit some of the other pro lines to see if there isn't something else with out a piano gloss keyboard.

Are you serious? Uninstalling bloatware is so simple a caveman can do it.

 

[marcplante]

Bloatware is easy, though it can get a little dicey deleting the brand specific utilities that may or may not be critical to a given piece of hardware, especially when the recovery bits for a single, critical utility may be tough to track down since they're part of a bulk "recovery image." Combine this with a wife that has the patience of a terrier on crack...

I build my own boxes from scratch, but will defer the service of my wife's computer to an "expert." I've maintained my own BMW that I drive on tracks for 15 yrs, but I defer to the Honda dealer to change the oil in her minivan.