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Horrendous LCD ruins this laptop
I knew I had made a mistake when I got this laptop and saw the glossy screen. The screen is so glossy it acts as a mirror where you often find yourself staring at yourself. The viewing angle is also the poorest I have seen on any LCD on any computer ever. When I attempt to watch a movie in bed with my girlfriend, only one of us can see the movie without the colors being inverted. We constantly fight over the placement of the screen and eventually both end up being un-happy. The viewing angle is so bad that by shifting your head, I am not exaggerating, one or two inches in any direction you can significantly change the contrast of the colors on the screen.

If it were not for the horrendous screen this laptop would have been a pretty good purchase. My next complaint would have been placing the USB plugs at the lower right hand side of the keyboard...the area you place your mouse (the USB cables end up clashing with your mouse and your hand).

Great Laptop, Decent Software
To be clear, I bought the VGN-FZ460E from Amazon.com, which comes with a Blu-Ray drive and 2GB RAM.

First of all, this laptop is great. It's the second one I have ever purchased, and a much needed upgrade from my 6 year old HP. The wireless is fantastic, being built-in to the laptop, and nearly everything else was more or less plug-and-play. 3 SIDE USB ports make plugging in a drive or a peripheral utterly painless. Performance is excellent - I can run a disk defragger without noticing while I watch a movie, or surf the web (or write a review on Amazon.com). The appearance is exactly what I wanted - a laptop that I could take into a classroom or the office, yet could run games, movies, etc if it needed to (yet to test out the NVIDIA graphics card). What really surprised me was how quiet it runs...if not for the power light, I wouldn't even know it was running. It makes absolutely no noise...!

Things to keep in mind: it's rather large...not quite the 17" size, but certainly a worthly desktop replacement. It's not very light, and does not seem to take battery life into much consideration, although if you put it on low power and turn off the wireless, you can get up to 3 hours of battery life writing a paper, or something else that doesn't require a lot of juice.

My main issues with it, and why it doesn't earn 5 stars, are not at all hardware-related -- rather, it's the software that has been quite an annoyance. Before I rant about it, I must say that Vista looks incredible - the fading in and out of the windows, and the overall "soft" feel of it reminds me of my last swedish massage...very nice. However, comma, two things really irked me while doing the initial set up: 1) Vista's compatibility problems, and 2) Bloatware.

1) Vista - I ordered AT&T DSL concurrently (new place) and apparently they haven't gotten around to making their installation software Vista-compatible...this was 6 hours on the phone over three days, five hours of which were on hold with customer service reps...not sure if this was Microsoft or AT&T's fault, but it was certainly not at all what I expected of an OS that had been out for over a year. I have never needed to deride a company's level of service until that(those) day(s). Next, Vista is not yet compatible with Flash player - the one that plays all those video-like commercials without Media player running. IE crashed every other day until I turned it off. Reinstalling did not help.

2) Sony has installed about two screenlengths worth of (almost all useless) software that I have yet to use after two weeks. Much of it is free trial software along with the Vaio suite of software, which I have yet to use. I deleted most of the trial ware, until I hit upon Network Magic. I'm sure this program works wonders for some people out there, but after uninstalling it, it refuses to disappear, re-uninstall, or reinstall - it continues to haunt my computer. On one occasion, it even prevented installation of another program I downloaded off the web (can't remember the program). None of this would have been an issue had the software not pre-existed on my otherwise-great-to-use-Vaio to begin with.

One more point - no OS disks, and this is almost inexplicable - I had to call Sony customer service in order for them to email me instructions on how to make a set of recovery disks. Without looking on the weblogs, I wouldn't have even known that this computer had a backup partition on it. Sony's website was no help.

So, bottom line, this is an exceptional piece of equipment, with some not-so-exceptional software built into it. I was able to get quite a deal on Amazon, where I was only paying $100 extra for the Blu-Ray drive compared to other brands and models out there (the price has since changed). This, coupled with Sony's reputation for excellence, drove me to buy a Vaio, even though I tend to be a more value-oriented customer.

4200 RPM Hdd drag down all the performance
This is a machine cost more than $2000.00. It is so sad that it just come with a very lousy low end Hard Driver in 4200rpm. This drag down all the performance especially when you try to open Audio/Vedio edit software. It took so long to wait the software opend.

After several days usage, I can not help but purchased another Hard Drive in 7200rpm to repalce it.

Good purchase, speedy shipping
Very quick shipping and a great price. Battery life is a bit unimpressive however the computer runs great and I have really enjoyed the slightly higher than integrated video card for videos and games.

Excellent, I recommend it
This is a great laptop, very powerful and the screes is awesome. The only thing should be better is the battery life, it's not very good. But, this laptop is perfect, silent, fast, excellent screen and it's not heavy. I RECOMMEND IT.