Sony is well known for their excellent laptop design, dating back to before physical beauty was a selling point to potential laptop buyers. Models like Sony’s X505 (reviewed here) ultralight, the thinnest notebook ever commercially produced to this day, set the bar very high for other manufacturers. The sz650 continues this tradition, with physical beauty rivaled only by a select few (Apple, Acer and late model Dell XPS). The premium full-coverage carbon fiber body is thin and sleek. The LED-backlit 13.3’’ screen is a marvel, bright and razor thin. The laptop spares no features but maintains a very light 4lb total weight.

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Hardware: The guts of the SZ650 are top of the line and no expense is spared to built one of the fastest ultraportables on the market. My SZ650n/c model came equip with a 2.2ghz Core 2 Duo t7500 processor, 2 video cards (an intel X3100 and a nVidia 8400GS), 4gb ddr2-667 RAM and a 160gb hybrid solid state/platter harddrive. Other amenities include a biometric fingerprint scanner, an integrated webcam and an expresscard slot (complete with multiformat card reader in the box). The screen is a marvel as well, a LED backlit panel that is even and bright. This impressive featureset comes with a hefty pricetag – in my case, just exceeding $2000. However, it would seem that the cost is justified.

Software: The software should pick up where the hardware leaves off in excellence. However, in the case of the SZ650, it absolutely does not. Sony made the enormous mistake of loading a business branded laptop full of Trial softare, better known as “bloatware” or less elegantly, “crap.” Even worse, Sony does not include any sort of Operating System disks, so I couldn’t format the machine and remove the junk. Its not like there were a few programs installed for my convenience, the system was loaded to the gills with unnecessary and infuriating software. They even included a full length, multi gigabyte copy of Spiderman 2 that could only be played through their proprietary software, which I would consider hardly appropriate for a business notebook. This alone was almost enough to make me return it to the Best Buy where I had purchased it, but I was able to do a clean install using a Vista disk that I already owned.

Believe it or not, it was actually downhill from here. Sony’s (necessary) driver utilities are poorly built, resource intensive and barely functional. The ingenious-on-paper “hybrid graphics card” system, which allows you to switch between dedicated and integrated graphics to save battery life in situations that do not require dedicated graphics power, is crippled and very close to useless. Not only does it require a full reboot to take effect, the switching utility actually stopped detecting when I had changed the switch after about a week. I eventually did another clean install of Windows Vista and the driver resumed working (only to fail again). The wireless drivers were also questionable and often resulted in dropped connections while signal was excellent. I tested the Vaio alongside my Apple Macbook Pro (reviewed here), and it experienced no problems with wireless where the Vaio struggled.

Build Quality: In my time with it (about a month of constant use), the Vaio held up fairly well. However, shortly after I sold it (due to the immense number of problems I had with the software), the buyer complained that the left-click button had ceased to function and he also was experiencing some problems with the screen. I verified these problems and helped him work with the warranty to have it repaired, but no laptop should have significant hardware issues in the first month of ownership.

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In conclusion - I hate to say it, but I do not recommend the Sony Vaio SZ650. For what its worth, the Dell XPS m1330 has an almost identical configuration available and I would be inclined to choose the Dell over the Sony in a future situation where I needed another laptop in this category. The SZ650 appears nice on paper and looks good on the surface, but that beauty is only skin deep and the prevalent problems keep me from recommending it. Look elsewhere for a 13’’ laptop with dedicated graphics, as Asus, Dell and others off comparable models without the garbage pre-installed and hardware quality issues.