March 12, 2005
New Notebook
For various work-related purposes I decided to buyinvest in a Windows notebook. Read on for some experiences with my brand new Sony Vaio VGN-FS115M.
Being an Apple PowerBook user for many years now (the PowerBook will probably remain my primary computer for years to come), I have strong demands regarding the design and feel of a notebook. For example, all these extra buttons and status LC displays found on many notebooks make me crazy. For a while I worked with an Acer notebook that had a big button labelled "Arcade" right beneath where I use to rest my left hand palm. Pushing this button would start up kind of a full-screen media player application. Unfortunately, due to the button's location, I often hit it accidently, resulting in unwanted work interruptions.
After having the look of the various notebook offerings, I settled on the Sony Vaio VGN-FS115M. It is quite slim and lightweight, has a nice 15 inch widescreen display (Sony's super-bright X-black display technology plays in a league of its own), and has a decent design, however, still being miles away from the superior design of a PowerBook.
Unfortunately, the Vaio came with Windows XP Home (German) preinstalled, with is, in a word, unacceptable for me. So I made a recovery DVD (you never know...) and installed XP Professional (US English) from scratch — after all, I have to put the 1300 Euros I paid for my MSDN subscription to some use...
After the basic XP system was installed, as one would expect, the typical Windows-related driver problems started. First I downloaded the drivers and tools packages from the Sony support web site, which is actually quite useful. Then I installed the various drivers, some via the device manager, others by running their setup application. All went well until I came to the audio driver. The setup for the Realtek ALC260 aborted in the middle of the installation process with a quite informative "The Microsoft bus driver must be loaded..." error message, leaving my system with a partly installed audio driver. After some trial-and-error (re-installing other drivers, playing with the device manager, etc.) I decided to download the driver directly from the Realtek web site (the download speed was painfully slow). Luckily, the new driver installed successfully. Now that I have the basic system up and running, I am probably gonna spend another day making it usable (installing software, turning off all of the annoying Windows XP TheUserIsTooStupidForAnything options, etc.).
Update: I tried to install a newer release of the NVidia universal video driver, but during installation it claimed that it could not find supported hardware, despite the notebook's video chipset (nVidia GeForce Go 6200) being listed as supported. Okay, so I'll keep the older one.
Currently Visual Studio .NET is being installed, so in the meanwhile a few notes on the hardware. Overall manufacturing quality is quite good, as one would expect from Sony. The display is great, the keyboard is good, though not as good as the one from my PowerBook. The trackpad is a little bit too insensitive for my taste; it does not react to finger movements immediately, there is an initial delay of about 100-200 ms before the cursor starts to follow the finger movements. I will need to get used to that.
Other Random Notes
The design of the notebook ends at the power adapter. The same impractical black brick as used by every other Windows notebook. Battery time is about 2 hours when doing basic web surfing. Not that great, but that's not how the notebook will be used anyway. The notebook's fan is silent and I cannot hear the hard disk at all. Performance is as one would expect from an 1.6 GHz Pentium M — sufficient for the intended use of the notebook, which is demonstrating some applications, giving presentations and occasional development.
Overall, I find the notebook quite okay, considering the price I paid for it — 1129 Euros, excluding VAT.
Posted by guenter at March 12, 2005 09:20 AM