Great DVD player and a good typewriter....

Author's Rating:

Pros: Look, feel, prestige, long battery life, useful software and more…

Cons: Kind of slow performance, no system restore discs and more…

The Bottom Line: 
Please read the full story...

Author's Review
As a student, my wife needs a notebook. I gave her my Sony Z505HS super slim pro. It's about 3lb, >12in screen, full size keyboard, one inch thick but still no good for her - 1.5 hours battery life is too short (and a power adapter tends to require to be plugged in). Fine, I got for her triple capacity battery - over 6 hrs of working ability - something wrong again, it's too heavy now (the battery itself is 1.7lb).... (I think I recall something very similar in one of the fairytales my nanny told me when I was little....)

OK, for 2004 New Year I got her a new PCG-TR2A. First of all, expressing my e-pinion, if you are buying a portable PC notebook there is no competition to Sony. (I also would consider Dell for its price and reliability, but somehow girl's best friends are not men....) so only choice I had is Sony. For folks who need a super-light portable notebook and they are shopping for themselves I highly recommend keeping away from nice looking Fujitsu because its low reliability and gorgeous Sharp because its low reliability on total "non-upgradeability". But it's your money...
I also can recommend you Toshiba’s larger notebooks. IBM makes a great line of business notebooks but they too overpriced and have few software titles installed for home users.

Let’s talk about PCG-TR2A:

Good stuff:

It looks gorgeous and feels nice. It’s very light (3.11 lb with the battery), just over one inch thick, near full size keyboard (Sony estimated it as 95% of full size).
Ultra Low Voltage Intel Pentium M Processor 1.0 GHz (with adaptive step-up technology) Microsoft® Windows XP Home Edition.
10.6" widescreen XBRITE(tm) LCD display 40 GB hard drive
512 MB DDR-266 shared RAM.
Amazing battery life up to 7.0 hours
Integrated 802.11b wireless LAN
Integrated CD-RW/DVD combo drive
Integrated swivel VGA camera
Memory Stick Media slot, for easy integration of countless digital devices
2 USB 2.0 ports, one firewire port, integrated network and data/fax modem.

As usually, Sony puts tons of Sony proprietary software – they are very useful. Sony takes good care of fixing all possible software bugs, and compatibility of there hardware to future new operating system (after those get released, of course). I want to emphasize the gorgeous, beautiful screen - very sharp and feels like you are looking into high quality TV set. Currently, this is the best LCD display available.

As I mention in my Pros - thanks to a built-in CD-RW/DVD combo it's a great wide screen format DVD player with a decent sound and the battery enough for two full features movie. (Playing DVD's requires more processor power and brighter screen so it drains down the battery faster. My wife and hundreds more people would write several more pages of good stuff about this little beauty. But I'm slightly different. For me all good stuff is done. Oh, no. I’d like to point to the excellent customer and technical support Sony has to offer you for your money.

Bad stuff (from my point of view):

To conserve the power CPU, using its adaptive step-up technology, runs at speed 1GHz only when fully loaded (like doing heavy calculations in Excel, or watching DVD's). The rest of the time it cools down to 850MHz. I can't find specs on the hard drive but it way too slow than I had expected. Even if it’s 4200 RPM one-- it performs kind of slow. A thirds party diagnostic and monitoring utility shows the hard drive mode as ATA-5, with max read speed as 19.1 MB/s. (Just for comparison: Dell Inspiron D600 with the same hard drive - 40GB/4200RPM read hard drive with 27.3MB/s speed – 25% difference very noticeable). Anyway, as for me, the computer is too slow for even the everyday tasks (like e-mails, Internet, word processing) as it takes too long to open new applications. On other hand I might kill the performance slightly myself by running all the time antivirus, firewall and some other utilities. Also I was able to render a whole 1 hour DVD for 5.5 hours – so it can do some work, just slow (an average new desktop would do the same work in 2-2.5 hours).
I do the disk defragmentation automatically every week. Still this computer just testing my passion or maybe I’m too impassioned. Giving all noise about new Centrino technology Sony, trying to extend battery life, partially killed the performance. On performance benchmark utility this computer had beaten hell out of Celeron 1.7 GHz, just slightly giving up in performance to Athlon 1.2 GHz. As Intel claims it should be more like 2.2GHz computer but it’s not.

So if you have an extra 2.2 G, or want to impress your girlfriend, or just want to make up ( :-)) to you wife - you can get it. Don't get me wrong - I love Sony's product. It just you have to make your mind and understand what you expect from this notebook and what you'll get.

Screen is very easy gets “fingerprinted” and looks ugly with all that dirty spots. On top of that you can’t just wipe it off. To clean it I’m using Windex with vinegar (you can kill antiglare coating if you use Windex with ammonia!!!! ).

A swivel camera does what ever it was designed to do – swivels by itself 180 degrees and most of the time lens is facing outside and not inside and gets dirty. Potentially it can get scratched.

There is no latch on the computer so it happened to us that some small items got between the keyboard and the screen when computer has been carried in the bag. It’s potentially dangerous as you can scratch the screen.

Wireless 802.11b card is mini-PCI based card, which can be easy replaced, but Sony doesn’t allow you to upgrade to the different cards (let’s say 802.11g, if your network requires different standard) by threatening of revoking your warranty. So the only option you have is PCMCIA network cards.

This time Sony cut the cost by not including even System Restoration Disc(s) in the package. They make a hidden 5 GB partition on the hard drive and make all restoration available through Sony’s proprietary software. If the hard drive goes bad after warranty expired – you will be out of luck. The same software gives you an option to create your restoration CD. You need 9 blank CD disc, 2 hours of your time and on top of all you can’t even verify if disc were created successfully!! SHAME on Sony. For $2299 they should include a restoration disc in DVD format so it would take only one disc.

I’m exhausted from this review. Of cause I recommend this beauty for many people, but you should understand what you need it for.

My usual epilogue:
In all my reviews I refuse to spend time retyping specs from a manual or manufacturer’s websites. My goal is to show what was important to me in choosing a product, so people can make their own decisions if those features I needed are essential to them or not. Nobody should buy any product just based on someone’s review only – to be happy with you purchase you have to do your home work. But it’s strictly my personal E-pinion.