Well, I finally got a desktop replacement for my aging Dell desktop. It's a SONY VAIO FW490. It's the 4th version of the FW model which first made its debut one year ago. The major update for the FW 4 series is the new ATI 4650 graphics card which is substantially better than the ATI 3650 it replaces. In other words, you can do some decent gaming on this thing. Of course, it doesn't mean you can go crazy with Crysis, but it's still a good mainstream video card.

Build quality is good, maybe not as good as the unibody Macbook Pro, but it's still good. The display is good, again not the best I've seen, but it's better than the displays on most Dell notebooks. I'm still getting used to the island-style keyboard, occasionally making mistakes since the keys are spaced slightly farther apart than usual. I expect to get used to it. It gets warm, but not hot and stays pretty quiet. The blu-ray player works flawlessly and I've been able to burn a few DVDs with no problems. Performance is good, applications load quickly and Vista is okay, but thankfully I'm getting a free upgrade to Windows 7 in October.

So far the only hitch has been a missing SONY MusicPass card which was a promotion to purchase the notebook. It allows me to download 100 free songs from SONY's music collection. I called customer service and should get it next week via FedEx.

1st update: I received the MusicPass and entered the PIN # to take a look at the Sony MusicPass collection. There are probably 10-20 songs I'm interested in. I wish it was 100 free songs on the iTunes store instead. Too bad.

2nd update: I have adjusted pretty well to the keyboard. It took a couple of weeks of typing.
Teddy's World (and what a world it is): My Review: SONY VAIO FW490
Aug 7, 2009 My Review: SONY VAIO FW490 Notebook PC. Well, I finally got a desktop replacement for my aging Dell desktop. It's a SONY VAIO FW490.

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My Review: SONY VAIO FW490 Notebook PC
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