Opinions of Sony S Series laptop

[[XC] moddolicous]

Hey guys. My brother is going to college next year and he is looking at some laptops. He is a fan of smaller laptops. Not netbook sized, but a little larger. Think the macbook size or so (don’t worry, he isn’t getting a mac. I won’t allow it). He really liked the size of the Sony s series laptop. Do you guys have any opinions on Sony laptops? I expect it to come preloaded with TONS of stuff (lots of bloatware), which I will promptly uninstall and clean up.

Or can you recommend any similar sized laptops?

He is not a major computer nerd, so the laptop will come with an i5 processor and 4gb of ram, which will suit his needs. Thanks

[Macadamia]

The SA/SB are pretty good notebooks for their pricing, and they look gorgeous.
You can get customize with Windows Professional and there's an option to come without any bloatware (W7Pro only though).
If you want 13/14 inchers though, there are 2 main alternatives from the big'uns:

The HP Envy 14 goes up to quad core Sandy and has a better build, unfortunately if you want the 1600*900 Radiance display you'd have to get it on eBay, and that's the last gen Arrandales (but that's worth it). Bonus +/- points: it looks like a MBP. Yay!

I particularly fancy the Lenovo X1: It doesn't do everything right, and it's definitely not the best value for money, but goddarn it- if you don't need a discrete GPU for gaming, this is amazing. It's thin and light, reasonably priced, charges fast, fast standard voltage CPU, and is designed really darn well- and that keyboard just makes typing a pleasure (it's not on my early 08 Macbook Pro).

You can get an Asus or Acer for cheaper, but the TimelineX has awfully small touchpads, and Asus' US presence still isn't convincing enough for me to make a recommendation in the states for a whole computer made by them.

[ericware]

Maybe you would want to consider SONY Z series?