I had a PCG-Z505S and the only thing that I didn't get working was the WinModem, but then I had high speed connection everywhere anyway so I never bothered trying. The 12" screen is a delight to work with, X configures up no trouble at all. Sound is well supported now. USB may well take some effort, but I did get it working.
The only complaint was the battery life, on the standard battery you could may get 1.5 hours out of it is you're lucky. I don't know about the 3x battery and I didn't have one. Only had CD not DVD so can't comment. Trick to installing from cd-rom, when the kernel boots append: ide2=0x180 to the lilo boot line and the cd is available as a regular ide device, doesn't even need pcmcia support to access it. This machine was great when I had both the laptop and a desktop machine, but now I'm done to one machine only I found the Sony not quite upto the task of day to day heavy development machine and went for a full size laptop instead (Dell Latitude CPx) which is a great machine you just have to live with the weight. Mike
