Hi Belgrave.
You sure must have bought your machine at the time writing but I wanted to expose my experience to those who are asking themselves the same question and reading this right now. First I bought a FZ21M and must have exchanged it because the hard disk recovery data wasn't there so I couldn't even create a DVD recovery set, which is obviously elemental and crucial as you probably already suspect with an OS like Vista.
So I paid to exchange my unit for a FZ21Z cause I really like the overall design of the FZ series, and I usually buy a lot of SONY stuff. After all I am kinda' satisfied but somehow worried by some weird noises from the hard drive, also by the Vaio update feature that is still not working after all this time the FZ series has been released, (because the FZ series all have the same problem (ID=008) that tells the model is not recognized or available on the server); the bent case seems to be such a frequent one cause I thought it was somehow "normal" having held and inspected pretty meticulously two exact same units in my hands with the case that was in fact slightly bent over in the center; also after you clean up all the crappy utilities and Norton shit and co. and install a quality/fast AV and of course jewels like Diskeeper that defragment your poor and slow 5400 rpm HDD, and you really keep in mind that once you have given the money service is far less beautiful and efficient that vaunted, and if you're ready to accept that it is definetely NOT a desktop replacement solution, so I'd say go for it. I usually take it with me onboard with an WD Passport 160GB and some sound gear like Alesis Multimix Firewire and oxygen keyboard to "can" some musical ideas on Samplitude 9.0/Cubase 4/Reason 4, as well as working on huge building plans on AutoCad/3DS MAX and like I said it is definetely not my main workstation with a dual Xeon DualCore/Quadro FX4500/4GB RAM ECC but for the mobile needs it is decent.
