Mans Best Friend! (Sony Vaio FX501)

Member Name: Treks

Product:	Sony Vaio FX501
Date:	01/08/04 (535 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Hardwearing, Great value for money

Disadvantages: A little heavy

The PCG-FX501 serves as an excellent entry-level notebook, boasting enough
processing power to deal with any task you could reasonably ask a notebook
to perform, such as word processing documents, spreadsheets and
email-internet access. It runs with an AMD Duron 1.1GHz CPU, supported by
256MB of RAM and a 20GB Hard Drive split into two partitions, which
basically means applications and data can be kept separate from each other.
That's only really a concern for people that like setting up their systems
that way as many PCs on the market today only have a single partition
anyway. A cautionary note, however. The 501 comes with 4 "restore" CDs
which when used, return the 501 to its factory settings. If you haven't
backed up your data before using them, you'll lose it.

Peripheral ports on the 501 are located mostly on the back of the 501. From
left to right are the DC in socket, a USB port, hidden by a snap-down panel
are an RJ11 network socket, an additional monitor socket, an LPT printer
port and a nine-pin male serial port, with a second USB port and finally an
RJ45 socket for the internal modem completing the set.

The 501 has served me faithfully for almost seven months now, in many more
roles than I'm sure SONY ever intended. For five months, the 501 was my
home computer. The hardware inside is man enough to support most games that
I play, with only the 8MB of available graphics memory causing me any real
problems. The 501 becomes a DVD player with the easy-to-use WinDVD software
and even a jukebox with the powerful Real jukebox program bundled with the
system..

I travel a lot in my job, and now the 501 travels with me. As a matter of
fact, I'm using my 501 to type up this review while enjoying the North Devon
sunshine and scenery. The battery lasts for a good couple of hours on an
overnight charge and is perfect for ou
t-and-about users. The 501 may not
have fancy blue-tooth or any super cool gadgets but it does exactly what it
says on the tin, and it does it all extremely well.

One gripe I do have about the system is that it runs on a Windows XP Home
operating system. Sure, XP has all the bells and whistles it could ever
need, but for a computer engineer that likes to tweak his system just the
way he likes it, I find XP to be quite restricting. I won't go into that
too much here as this is a review about the 501, not XP. Suffice it to say,
had the 501 been made available with Windows 2000, or even Windows Me, I
would have snapped one up myself rather than buying it second hand from a
friend.

The 501 looks like it can handle a tumble or two, and this has certainly
proven to be the case. My one year old daughter often goes looking for the
Daddy's computer and has more than once found a way to pull it off my desk,
or worse still, use it as a stepping stone to pull that difficult-to-reach
wallpaper from the wall. Each time, the 501 has come through with perhaps a
little cosmetic damage, but that really is all.

I actually bought mine from a friend for £700.

In conclusion, the 501 is a more than capable notebook, more suited to
business / administrative use than for gamers. If it's games play you want,
get a console. If it's a handy, portable workstation that will serve you
well pretty much as soon as it comes out of the box, then the 501 is for
you

Summary: