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New Sony VAIO Laptop w/ 16.1" Screen
calc writes "Sony Japan has announced a new VAIO laptop that comes with a DVD-R/RW CD-R/RW drive along with a Radeon 7500 Mobility and 16.1" UXGA LCD." The spacebar on my thinkpad has been
dying... maybe its time for a change. Sony? You listening? *grin*
If you're planning on mastering a DVD video, wouldn't your battery die before the process is complete (encoding + burning)? If so, then what's the point? How long does it take to burn a DVD anyway?
Wow, I'm continually amazed by the high-quality products pumped out by Sony, specifically as part of their VAIO line. This little beast looks to be no exception (16.1"? Hot damn that's a lot of xterms!).
However, I am afraid of the impact this laptop might have on the Linux market. Linux has had most of its growth running on older computers that have been replaced with fast, new ones by people who want to watch DVD's, surf the web, and play the latest games. One of the beauties of Linux has always been that you could grab that old Pentium one that was headed for the trash heap, slap Debian on there, and have a damn fine firewall. Even Joe Average PC Owner can figure Mandrake or Red Hat out enough to get Linux running on an obsolete box.
Sadly, this is not the case with new PCs. Higher-end systems tend to come with the latest Windows (that most people will keep just for the "gee whiz" factor) pre-installed. Furthermore, they may come with the latest cutting-edge peripherals (such as video cards, DVD players, and printers) that aren't yet supported under Linux. For whatever the reason, people who don't mind using Linux to "rescue" a dump-bound 486 will frequently have qualms about wiping Windows from their shiny new Dells.
Unfortunately, Sony has a history of making this effect even more pronounced with it's VAIO laptops. They frequently use proprietary chipsets and hardware that isn't fully supported under Linux. Reports about of incompatiblities with filesystems, X configuration, and modem support.
What this boils down to is that this product, sweet as though it may be, is bound to have a detrimental effect on Linux sales. I think I'll pass on this one. Hopefully, if enough people (I'm looking at you, CmdrTaco) follow suit, we'll send Sony a message, demonstrate that Linux does belong on new PCs, and the world will thank us.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I am not quite sure I understand where Sony is coming from including a DVD-RW drive. From what I have read, they are completely DVD+RW driven, to the point of being a member of the alliance. The thing that irks me here is that this does not help the already splintered standard battle going on out there. On one hand you have Phillips, HP, Yamaha and Sony supporting DVD+RW, and on the other, you have Pioneer, Apple, and ..... Sony supporting DVD-RW. How can this be good for the end user?!
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
amateurs.
gateway handbook 486. 20 mb of RAM (upgraded from original 8). came with windows 95. now it's running FreeBSD, my domain's DNS, my email, my SSH into my home LAN...
MORTAR COMBAT!
I recently went shopping for a laptop, and seriously considered a Sony 16.1" screen model. I decided against purchasing a Sony product because
Sony has an extremely bad policy in regard to OS support.
Sony encodes the BIOS with a designation describing the OS that it was sold with. This designation is checked by the drivers supplied by Sony. If the driver OS doesn't match the BIOS designation, the drivers do not load. This is to prevent buyers from installing an OS that the laptop was not sold with. Sony also does not make driver packages available for download online.
The end result is that you will be stuck with whatever OS the machine was sold with. Want to run Win2K Server on a machine sold with Win XP? Too Bad.
Want to dual boot Win2K and XP. Nah. Want to upgrade when the next Windows comes out? Nope.
The only exception to this is that it is possible with some fiddling to install Win XP Pro on a machine that came with XP Home. But don't count on Sony to tell you how! They won't.
In my opinion the result is that Sony laptops are completely unsuitable for technically inclined users.
BTW, my search ended up with a Compaq 2800T with WinXP and the same Radeon card as the Sony. It's got a 15.1" screen, USB 2.0 and is FAR more portable. It also runs RedHat 7.3 and Windows 2000 just fine.It's also expandable to 1gig of RAM and has USB 2.0. The configurability from the Compaq store is also far better than with the Sony.
Sony? Not until they adopt a less hostile OS policy.
Sorry to sound like a typical slashdot troll, but does this come with Linux preloaded? I'm shopping for a laptop, and I *really* don't want to pay the Microsoft Operating System Tax(tm) for an OS I'm not going to use. Any recommendations on laptops with preloaded linux and places to buy them that *WON'T* charge me for Windows?
I saw a laptop with a 16" screen in Best Buy about two months ago..
I bought a Sony for work and although it's a nice machine (when it's working properly), Sony's tech support is intollerable. I have a combo DVD/CDRW on it and it stopped recording about a month after purchase. I called Sony tech support and the first thing they wanted me to do was use the recovery CD to wipe everything out and start with a factory install of software, even though I was getting hardware errors. They would not attempt to troubleshoot it until I did this. It being the only machine at my disposal, I didn't have time for this so I figured I'd live with no CDRW. About 5 months later, I was on the other side of the country at a conference when the CD drive stopped working completely. It wouldn't even boot to the CD so it was obviously not a driver problem. Even though they agreed that they would have to replace the DVD/CDRW drive they said they would still put a factory install of software on the hard drive because it was their standard procedure (no exceptions). On top of all this, the turn-around time was 14 business days.
Sony obviously does not cater to the business user.
took GPL'd code for POSE, modified it for the CLIE, and distributed binaries without making source available.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
They also distributed a modified version of the GPLed POSE Palm emulator with their Clie development kits, sans source. When asked to make the source available, they told the author to go fuck himself.
Also, their CD players last about a year, in my experience. Shoddy and shady, I hope CmdrTaco is the only person to buy this laptop.
Us 3D Users (Lightwave, 3DSMax, Maya, etc...) have high hopes that one day we'll be able to do our work on laptops. Up until about a year or two ago, it was a high cost/low benefit tradeoff. You had to spend roughly $3,000 to get a $1,500 machine, and you had limitations that were pretty sucky. (I.e. lack of CDR, low RAM, small/slow hard drive, no 3D acelleration to speak of...)
That has changed recently. Now they come with pretty decent 3D Accelleration, CD/DVD writables, respectable amounts of RAM, hard drives are big but still slow, and you can run at really high resolutions like 1600 by 1200. All this for round about $2,500. It's still a little high, but I'm due for an upgrade soon.
There's still life to my current machine, but I am going to get a new laptop to replace my desktop in the next year or so. Until this year, I felt like that was a pipe dream. I'm very excited about what's coming down the road. The nice thing is, I'm not going to need to go shopping for an LCD Screen!
"Derp de derp."
they're also putting serious pressure on the univeristy I work for to block IPs for sharing movies and music on the Uni network. they're bastards and should go fuck themselves. if they really wanted to stop piracy they should stop making CDRs and CD-RW drives.