Recently I upgraded my primary laptop from  Dell Latitude D410 to a Sony Vaio AR690U.   I knew going in that I was going to give up the great battery life that I enjoyed with the Latitude but hoped that I’d love the rest of the machine so much that I could overlook that.  I was wrong.  The Vaio simply feels cheap and poorly designed.  The keyboard is unusually loud.  The flip down panel that provides access to the display outputs feels like it’s going to break off and I’m just waiting for the pullout cover for the ethernet port to snap.  It’s got a latch for the cover that sticks regularly and often catches my wrist after having inadvertently flipped up.  The on/off switch for the wireless interface is right in front and easy to accidentally hit.  The power button is right where you would put your thumb when picking this beast up.  The battery doesn’t feel securely mounted.  I finally managed to get the 4GB of RAM out of our vendor.  The fine print on the spec sheet implies that there might be some issue with the system seeing more that 3GB of RAM.  I’ll clear that up.  Windows (Vista Ultimate in this case) can’t see more than 3GB of RAM in this system.  It’s actually not Windows’ fault.  It has to do with the chipset and motherboard.  On top of all this the wireless interface is flaky when moving on and off AC despite going through the power settings to override any battery saving behavior around wireless.  Oh, and Sony didn’t bother to ship or make available for download the NVRotate utility that the NVIDIA 8600M GT can utilize.  Asus provided it to my friend who recently got one of their high end machines.  (NVIDIA says to get it from the manufacturer) I’d be darn jealous of that Asus except that I at least have a Blueray drive and his battery life is even worse than mine since they don’t make an extended battery for it.  Performance wise it’s about what you’d expect from the spec.  Though the memory performance does keep it down to to a 4.8 overall on the Vista performance measurement tool.  My beef isn’t with the performance.   For this much money in this day you would just think that they would have put out a solid feeling product.  Maybe I’ll put Vista on a MacBook Pro for my next machine.