I have had a Sony Vaio pcg-gr390 since July 2002.
It's been a great, reliable, and rugged laptop.
Alas, I had to replace it with a grt170 (it's awesome though huge) when the screen was destroyed by a my foolishness combined with the actions of a 3 year old boy.
What's most interesting about this model was my experiences with it between versions of Windoze and Linux.
It shipped with <gag> Windows XP Home.
I didn't even bother booting up and setting up XP, I imemdiately wiped it by booting a Redhat 7.3 CD (of course RC Willey would not honor the EULA and give me a refund, same with CompUSA in Tucson, AZ not honoring the EULA either for the grt170, but that's a whole other story).
I was pleasantly surprised when almost everyting worked with just the default install!
The only things in that well loaded laptop that didn't work out of the box was:
ACPI battery and screen brightness features
Winmodem
Music CD playing (data music worked fine).
Everything else worked!!!
The memory stick, USB, Serial, Parallel, video, audio, network, pccard slot and cards, cdrom and burner, hd, even the infrared!
As I ran the Up2Dates these ran even better.
The ACPI, scrool mouse, and screen brightness were resolved with a simple utility added: sonypid.
Linmodem resolved the winmodem, but I never needed it.
Wireless worked once the redhat updates from up2date were in place.
The real irony is that I tried to put w2k server on (for admin and testing reasons) but there was NO driver support for it. And w2k was only marginally better. The same for win9x (For games). Xp Pro almost worked except no scrolling mouse, ACPI, or screen brightness support period (at least with linux there was a solution that could be added. Only XP home was supported. Sheesh. So I spent  most of that year using about 98% Linux on it. Yay. It was a wonderful experience. No more crashing, no more inexplicably corrupted or lost files, no viruses (though surely that won't be forever), and many other benefits.
I've used Linux since 1994/5 but it was never this easy on a laptop before. Oh caloo calay, happy day.