Sony VAIO Pro SVP11213CXS 11.6-Inch Core i5 Touchscreen Ultrabook (Carbon Silver)

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Price: $1,148.00    

Product Feature

• Intel Core i5-4200U
• 4 GB DDR3
• 128 GB Solid-State Drive
• 11.6-Inch Touch-Enabled Screen
• Windows 8

Product Description

Sony IT VAIO SVP11213CXS 11.6-Inch Laptop

Sony VAIO Pro SVP11213CXS 11.6-Inch Core i5 Touchscreen Ultrabook (Carbon Silver) Review

The form-factor is great, the screen is very impressive and the overall experience is good. There are quite a few 'buts' however... While, perhaps ironically, the fan noise is fine at high speeds, at slow speeds it's just annoying. In a quiet environment you can hear a constant 'rattle' or 'whir' that changes frequency depending on the fan speed. Initially I thought I had a defective model, but I've heard from others that they noticed the same thing. This is hard to forgive as its main competitor the MacBook Air is dead silent at low fan speeds. This was the biggest disappointment by far for me, and it's a constant reminder I perhaps should've gone for the Air instead.

The other issues are currently being fixed with driver updates, but with the standard set of software / drivers I had the following experience:

- It would not always go to sleep when closing the lid
- When it wakes up from sleep the WiFi doesn't work anymore, and it blue-screens Windows 8 when you fiddle with it
- The touch-pad is flaky at times and does not respond to taps
- It would take up to 20 seconds before it would restart or shut-down. The start-up time is amazing at almost instant, but I've gotten annoyed with having to wait for it to shutdown or restart.
- Even though I've set it to not adjust the brightness automatically, it would continue to continuously adjust brightness

I've re-installed Windows 8 and cherry-picked drivers / software and it seems to do much better now. The latest versions of drivers fix a lot of issues, and some of the bugs are to be expected with a brand new machine, so it's definitely not a major fault.

Because the hardware is so new, Linux is somewhat of a challenge to install (you need a 3.10+ kernel, custom patches from Intel to get the 7260 WiFi chip going and a kernel hack to get the CPU frequency scaling to work correctly,) but the experience is excellent in Linux. I'd say it was better than Windows 8 out of the box.

If it weren't for the fan noise, I'd recommend this little machine in a heartbeat. As it stands, it's a great attempt from Sony, but it falls short for me on a few things (noise and stability).

Update (7/29/2013):
I've been using it for a few weeks now and have taken it with me on travel abroad. In noisier environments (airports, offices, etc) you really never notice the fan noise, it doesn't get very hot and it actually works really well on a plane. While people next to me had to assume yoga positions to still see their screen when the person in front of them reclined their seat, I could comfortably fit it still on the tray-table. Additionally, it feels faster than the Thinkpad T410 from work and I can use it as a software development laptop.

I still stand by my complaints however. In a silent environment the fan noise is annoying, even at the lowest speed and I've caught myself lowering the resolution at times to reduce some eye-strain as the text is tiny at the standard screen resolution. So if you're considering this because of the higher resolution... also consider the downside. And finally, the WiFi still seems to have issues as it drops once in a while.

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