Sony VAIO VGN-AR520E Laptop (Refurbished)

This is a beautiful computer with a screen resolution typically found only in gaming laptops or for which you pay a premium. The only drawbacks to this computer are easily remedied. First the hard drive runs at a speed that is a few generations old, 4,200rpm, which is pretty slow. Most of today's laptop drives run at 5,400 and many companies are moving to 7,200rpm drives. From my experience, installing a faster hard drive makes a noticiable difference in speed. In this case in preparation for the transfer of you system from your existing drive to the new drive be aware that by simply removing one screw you have access to the hard drive BAYS (yes there are two) so you can simply insert your new 7,200rpm drive (I used a Western Digital Scorpio Black, 320 GB, 3 Gb/s, 16 MB Cache, 7200 RPM) and use your favorite disk imaging software to copy your system to the new drive (I used Acronis True Image Home 2009). Simply by changing my hard drive from a 4,200rpm one to a 7,200.2rpm one, at a cost of $89, I picked up a noticable increase in speed. Second I replaced the RAM and inserted two sticks for a total of 4gb of Kingston HyperX gaming memory which also impacted speed and only cost $60. After I installed the new drive I placed the old drive back into the second slot to use as a back up drive using imaging software. These two, relatively inexpensive, upgrades will have your laptop running like one costing hundreds more. If you know what you are doing I also upgraded the T7100 to a socket "P" T7500.