Tara, I can’t answer your question with certainty because I’m not terribly familiar with the Sony Vaio line of computers. The mostly likely cause of difficulty for a laptop: Second Life requires a 3D video accellerator, and is mostly successful with new model ATI or NVidia cards. You may want to check out the Second Life system requirements for more details: scroll down to the bottom for their comments regarding supported and unsupported video cards.