I'm unfamiliar with the Viao line, but thoroughly familiar with Dell. My experiences with Dell, the lack of knowledgeable tech support and the company's total indifference to a failed machine would keep me from EVER doing business with them again. They basically screwed me out of $1500 with a computer that failed to operate correctly out of the box and for which Dell took no responsibility.

Since this happened in 1998 I have had four computers built locally, all at a good price and all but one which worked as advertised. The one lemon was repaired twice, then replaced, all without charge or shipping costs.

Based on my experience, I recommend to anyone looking for a new computer that they deal with an established local supplier, one who has been in business several years and has a good reputation. If anything goes wrong you can pop the computer in the car and have it looked at immediately. Moreover, the local company will have all the details of the machine on record, which is very useful when getting ready to make upgrades.

Jack

Geez, talk about diametrically opposed views here...I'd personally never own a Dell. Moderating so many forums, I can't count how many Dell horror stories I've heard.
I'm on # 14 or 15 VAIO laptop. I use the off the shelf parts, but always reformat and use my own build of XP as it's free of all the other junk that everyone puts on these things. I also add as much ram as I can. 1 gig has been the limit til recently. I've got a K on order right now.
My current 750 has been dropped 3 times by the bozos masquerading as TSA, and it still runs. Broken latch on the screen, but that only affects it going to sleep when I shut the lid. 17" screen is kinda wobbley after a year of hard core travel and being thrown around in a backpack from the volcanoes of Hawaii to the wild bus rides in Guatemala, nasty rains in Singapore to the ugly, UGLY baggage carriers on Quantas Air. It's even survived security at CDG airport where they are the worst/least careful searchers in the world. (according to USA Today)
So....I love my VIAO. They are the official laptop of VASST, we have 5 here in the office, no trouble with them EVER.
I was using VAIO LOoooooooooooongggggg before Sony acquired Vegas, I simply love em'. But, your mileage may vary.

I'd love to share the same opinion as you Spot, but after the anguish and lost weeks or even MONTHS farting around with my 2 cursed GRX laptops I just could never risk putting myself through it again. I posted one of mine off to New York this morning in fact to have it's RAM slots re-soldered, together with the original motherboard from the other one.

Did your 15 Vaio's ever include one from the GRX line? If so did it ever give you any hassle?

Never had a GRX, only the F series, V series, and PCG series.
Other than buying a V505 because of it's size and then learning that it had a Celeron rather than a Centrino, I've never had any serious problem with a VAIO of any kind.

I guess I've just been unlucky in choosing the GRX's then :-( Incidentally apart from the faulty RAM slot soldering my latest one required a new DVD drive and a new screen within warranty and a new hard drive just outside warranty. A pretty lousy record.

Spot, just out of interest, when you reinstall the OS do you tend to use the Vaio's recovery disks and then remove unwanted bundled programs and utilities, or do you install Windows off a set of Microsoft CD's?

I'm having a drink now as I've been trying to decide between a DELL and a SONY for a week now and the praise and horror seems to run in equal measures. OH well.
Any thoughts on my question about shared video memory and 4200 rpm drive on the K37?
SPOT is this the model your looking at?
Maybe I'll get a CUBE desktop and throw it in my onboard roller ;-).

I use Microsoft XP CD's. I don't ever even open the recovery discs, I keep them for when I sell the laptop.

bump sorry to bump but I would like to know if the 4200 rpm drive will handle Vegas.
Thanks
BB

Of course it will. :-) 5400 is slightly better, and 7200 is even sweeter, but are you really going to use the internal drive for editing? That's one thing I only do on small demo/training sessions. I use Firewire drives for EVERYthing. Stack em' deep, run em' cheap. You can get IBM travelstar 80 gig 7200 that will fit in most Sony chassis, and for 25.00 more, you can stick them in a housing.

bb, you don't want to use a 4200 rpm drive for real work... they totally suck for productivity.

go to this url for some great laptop info: http://notebookforums.com/

I'd like to see some proof of that theory.

My hard drive transfers at 37MB/sec.

Which means if I could render 4.7GB in 2 minutes and 11 secs, my hard drive could keep up.

So where am I wrong in thinking that the hard drive speed or rendering to a different hard drive is not that critical?

O.K. I'm awake now.

I have to read possibly 26GB, then render, then write 4.7GB so that means another 12 minutes of transfer time for a total of 14minutes of hard drive use to render a 2 hour or 4.7GB video and my hard drive can keep up.

If it was half as fast 28 minutes.

And this would be to and from the same hard drive.

Sorry for the slow comeback ..been off working...on a beautiful Protools HD system on a new G5 with the largest cinema display and the Focusrite Control 24..back home now and all my stuff seems small :-(

Nickle and Spot ..thanks for the replies, links and info. I have all my files on 3 250 gig firewire drives. Only the Program will run on the laptop..same as when I do audio. Just wanted to make sure the 4200 drive and shared video memory will playback the firewire material smoothly and run Vegas cleanly.. I will be rendering on my studio desktop..a P4 3gig machine. I just checked out the VAIO K37 in person it's a nice machine.
Thanks

Thanks scdragracing...good link!
BB

Just got one from Office Depot - $1599 with $400 in rebates (plus an extra 10% as my daughter has an employee discount). Sweet.