Sony VAIO PCG-GRT170 Notebook (2.80-GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive, DVD+/-RW/CD-RW Drive) – Hardware
Sony VAIO PCG-GRT170 Notebook (2.80-GHz Pentium 4, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB Hard Drive, DVD+/-RW/CD-RW Drive)I’ve never had more problems with a laptop than this one. According to the specs, it’s great– a fast CPU, lots of RAM, a great video card and a huge hard disk, plus a DVD burner! And look at that screen! It MUST be good! .. too bad it isn’t.The CPU is fast– but it’s a Pentium 4 DESKTOP processor. Not only does it suck up the battery life, it produces obscene amounts of heat, making the fan stay on all the time. So, you can hear the machine across the room at all times.The video card is incompatible with the latest drivers in most cases, and has huge incompatibilities with the latest games. Many won’t even begin to run.The DVD Drive can only burn at the most abysmally slow speeds. Writing a full DVD will take over 2 hours.Battery life is horrendous. You can expect 45 minutes if all you are doing is word processing. If you raise the CPU usage above 20%, you can expect 30 minutes. If you use it to the absolute maximum, expect 20. This is on the lowest screen brightness, folks. You can’t finish watching a DVD (Forget about burning one) on this machine. And Sony wants $300 for another one.The chipset is SiS, the cheapest out there; so don’t expect reliability. This machine crashes more than anything I’ve used in my entire life. Nothing ever works as it should.My machine had to be repaired twice now, and I need to bring it in tomorrow for MORE repairs. Here’s a short list of what is wrong ..- CPU fan nearly stopped. CPU overheated and crashed all the time.- 802.11x card stopped working entirely.- Speakers kept emitting bursts of deafening static.- Constant squealing noise from the hard drive.- 10 gb of the disk was unusable.- The left mouse button jammed.- One USB port was upside-down and didn’t work at all.- 30 minutes of battery life.- Wired ethernet rarely worked for longer than a few hours. Had to reboot constantly to keep it connected.- Most program crashed, especially games, even with the latest drivers, DirectX, and service packs.- 8 keys fell off under normal use.- Screen backlight began burning out; screen brightness would change at random and flash on and off.- Battery cover fell off and could not be reattached.- Most CDs could not be read. Drive takes over 30 seconds to spin up a disc for reading.- DVD playback is jumpy. Tons of read errors.Avoid this laptop. Get something that you can trust– from a company you can trust.
