Are sony vaio's the best laptop available right now?

Question

I need to get a laptop before college starts that will last me for 4 years (hopefully) and I want a pc. I went to best buy and they wouldnt shut up about the sony vaio i7-3537u so i was wondering if this is the best laptop available.

I'm a casual gamer, meaning i would like to play games, like LoL, but i dont need something with amazing graphics. all i care about is that the game runs smoothly.

so what are pros and cons of sony vaio, and is there anything better?

Answer 1

At Best Buy or any other retail outlet, they will push what they have the most of and have to move out the door. I spent a year with Circuit City doing service work. It never ceased to amaze me what they told the sells people to try to move and more important how they told them to move them.



There is no such thing as the best laptop, they are laptops.



Here is my suggestion for you.



ASUS laptop, good work horses and very light gaming



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230987

Core i5 3230M(2.60GHz) 15.6" 6GB Memory DDR3 1600 500GB HDD 5400rpm DVD±R/RW NVIDIA GeForce Dedicated 2GB GT 610M 1 Year Accidental Damage/30-Day Zero Bright Dot 5.8 lbs



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230416

Core i5 3210M(2.50GHz) 14.1" 8GB Memory 750GB HDD 5400rpm DVD±R/RW NVIDIA GeForce Dedicated 1GB GT 620M



This HP can be customized to what you need. If you want better performance upgrade the APU to a A10, dedicated graphics and increase the ram to 8GB. This one would probably fit you the best.



http://www.shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/Laptops/HP-ENVY/C9W57AV;pgid=c7twGfjc0ptSRpIq7ZUcoGXQ0000fb8mNv9y;sid=NID2W1inOb6JXwkRbh2qz4GoAJwzDmy78dUe8LW2AJwzDtPc7Kuhl6jI?HP-ENVY-15z-j000-Notebook-PC A8-5550M APU HD 8000 Series Graphics 6GB DDR3 750GB 5400 rpm HD Starting at $500 after rebate





This HP can be customized to. Upgrade the Graphics to NVIDIA GeForce GT 740M 2048MB of dedicated video memory. Pick this one if you must have the i7 CPU



http://shopping.hp.com/en_US/home-office/-/products/Laptops/HP-ENVY/E4T17AV?HP-ENVY-15t-j000-Quad-Edition-Notebook-PC i7-4700MQ 8GB DDR3 1TB 5400 rpm Hard Drive Starting at $800



Brand buying advice



You get what you pay for. Systems with high end parts with low prices are to be viewed with suspicion. They have to cut corners somewhere to get the price down. What cost you less today is going to cost you more tomorrow.



Apple makes a good quality laptop. The problem comes when it requires service or minor upgrades. It is near impossible to do anything with them. They even glue the battery and hard drive down so you can not change it. They solder the ram to the logic board so you can not increase it. They lock up most of the software so your stuck with what they approve.



Lenovo has serious stand behind their product problems. They bought IBM PC division and proceeded to drive the quality of the system into the ground. Their customer service is well below par. They even makes Dell customer service look good. Lenovo will not allow people to read instruction on how to access the BIOS menu or to get info on their puters on their web site unless you connect to them thru Facebook. They do this so they can spy on their users. The last and final thing to remember about them is they are a Chinese Government own company. It is up to you if you want to trust them.



Toshiba, Panasonic, Sony should be avoided because of their heavy modification of Windows and the drivers. If you remove some of the bloat they install, you can cripple the system.



Acer, Gateway, and eMachines should be avoided period. Low end system that are driving the race to the bottom.



Dell once made a good system and fell from grace. They are now struggling to regain their place in the market. Customer service is one of many problems with this company.



Alienware are glorified Dells and are more name then product. Priced extremely high for what you get. They do perform but you can get the same for less by looking around, just not packaged to be eye candy to the gamers.



Samsung has a history of using cheap parts in critical areas. Capacitors has been one area Samsung has a known history of going cheap, causing units to fail early. For that reason I would avoid them.



ASUS and HP do not modify Windows as bad as the other manufacturers. They have excellent build quality. They might add a lot of bloat but they also makes it easy to get rid of it.



Ultrabooks are the higher end of Wintel laptops but they have some of the same concerns as Apple. They make it next to impossible to change any hardware in them. Service of them will have to be done by the manufacturers. With most of them, you can not change your own battery or hard drive. They are designed to catch your eye but they are not any more special then other laptops except for the fact that they are slim or thin. Your paying for it being thin and slim. For the money your going to spend on it you can buy a much better laptop with more power.



Hybrids are the worse of the worse. The flip or detachable touch screens are just a disaster waiting to happen.



Never buy an All In One. They are far worst then laptops of any kind to service and they have a higher failure rate.



Choose wisely.



:)

Answer 2

If a Best Buy employee is trying to sell you a laptop based on its processor as a primary marketing point, what that means is that they don't really understand what they're talking about. In general, processor isn't a key issue, as what most laptops come with in terms of specs such as CPU and RAM is more than enough most users. It takes a specific application-based requirement for it to really make its way into relevance for concern which CPU you get.



Game performance, for one thing, depends significantly more on the GPU than on anything else. You'll hit a wall at your GPU's capabilities usually before it starts to matter how well your laptop does in other performance-related areas.



Another area of concern is the display. The display is important because it has a huge effect on your user experience -- both in terms of amount of space onscreen due to resolution itself, and in terms of image quality that creates its impression continuously. You want to make a point to get a decent display once it gets to be reasonable to do so. Much of this is just avoiding displays like 15.6" 1366x768 and 17.3" 1600x900, which make things onscreen large and are almost always low-grade LCD panels with very poor image quality due to low contrast.



---------



Also, Sony Vaio is not a specific laptop, it's an entire line of products by Sony. Could you tell us which specific laptop it is? Update your post and I'll try to remember to check back later. If you don't know, could you update your post with an approximate budget? Either way, acknowlede in some way or another that you have indeed read my post.



(And avoid selecting a Best Answer until I've had the opportunity to update my post in response to yours. Selecting a Best Answer blocks me out from updating my post.)

Answer 3

it depends what your using it for, alienware are the best laptops in theory but more for gaming and very expensive, i find sony vaio quite overpriced for what you get, you pay for the sony name first then the components,

its not the make or brand that makes it a good laptop but the components inside, the ;laptop you have selected is good but going with a different brand like asus or acer you will probably get a better one with a faster processor.

the i7s are good but yours is only 2ghz which isnt the fasted, quick enough for everydya use though. not ideal for any graphics design or rendering though.

http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=n0035145&s=dhs&c=uk&l=en&cs=ukdhs1&dgc=ST&cid=41141&lid=1069630&acd=239715600820560 is a touch screen from Dell with an i5 2.7ghaz processor for £418.00 GBP

the one you have selected is £850 in the uk, same insides, infact the dell 250gb more storage and has a bigger screen.