**** RETURNED ****

This Vaio has the potential to be a good notebook however my experience with it was horrible. Bought the machine for my wife thinking that the Sony / Vaio name gave me a better chance of finding something reliable.

#1 Sony load an incredible amount of bloatware, you probably need a couple of days to clear it all out before you load what you want on the machine. Uninstalls seem really slow on Vista.

#2 After doing #1 and setting up my wireless connection everything looks good. However whenever the Vaio goes into standby or hibernate on coming out of this mode I only have local network access and no internet access. Vista displays this by showing your home network as "Unidentified Network" Reboot and it works fine. Spent two to three days working on this, type "Vista Unidentified Network" into Google and you will see many similiar issues with Vista. Probably a bad driver, however I could not fix it.

From much reading on the web; Vaio and this problem are mentioned many times.

I just  more

Bloated with crapware

Unreasonably slow. Turns out all the "trial" stuff put on made it run like mud. Spent 3 hours uninstalling all the BLOAT. Then it was okay. But not worth all the time lost. There are too many good alternatives - HP, Lenovo, Dell, Toshiba, Acer. If I could I'd send Sony a bill for $300 just for the time it took to get this thing down to a NEW conditon.

Sony Vaio VGN-260E

I set up this laptop for my in-laws. It is a nice, peppy laptop for the price w/ a good industrial design. It does the basics well with a gorgeous screen (but so-so graphics card), decent battery, and decent keyboard. Sony provides some decent software to go along w/ Windows Vista and this includes a Sony movie making application, DVD viewing software, etc.

Cons: Sony does NOT support Windows XP on this laptop, so those who want to to downgrade from Vista to XP will have to work for it. Sony also loads the laptop with loads of bloat ware, to include trial versions of Adobe Acrobat, AOL, Corel Draw, MS Office 2007, Norton 360 (90 day trial), and SpySweeper (1 year). It took a long time to uninstall these apps. With 2GB RAM, the laptop ran sluggish at times, but for the most part was fairly responsive.

This laptop is not appropriate for power-users or serious gamers, but is well suited to surfing the Internet and watching movies. If you do not mind Vista, I would recommend it for  more