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Sony's Flash-Based Notebook Reviewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hefty-price-for-loss-of-capability dept.

Lucas123 writes "Computerworld's Rich Ericson reviewed Sony's first all flash-based laptop, which carries a whopping $3,200 price tag. Ericson says the laptop runs incredibly fast, with an average data transfer rate of 33.6MB/sec and great battery life. But, the laptop is also limited to certain uses. While lending itself to travel, the small capacity of its hard drive doesn't make it a real competitor for a main PC workhorse. 'While there's a lot to like [about the VAIO TZ191N notebook], there's only very limited uses for which I'd recommend this system. The best features — its size and the flash drive — are also its biggest limitations.'"

4 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. Re:WTF? Sony for $3k, Asus for $350? by ivan256 · · Score: 5, Informative

    You've got a great point. Toshiba wouldn't ever push restrictive DRM on consumers, own an RIAA member company, or pay a major studio to adopt their technology after it couldn't gain adoption on its own merits. They've actually got a squeaky-clean corporate reputation. Hugely ethical...

  2. Re:Hrm... by timeOday · · Score: 5, Informative
    Ok, I read your link: "With these mechanisms in place [wear leveling and bad block management], some industry analysts[1] have calculated that flash memory can be written to at full speed continuously for 51 years before exceeding its write endurance, even if such writes frequently cause the entire memory to be overwritten."

    Is that supposed to worry me?

  3. Re:Space issues by mstrebe · · Score: 5, Informative

    Space is a huge issue with SSD based laptops. This isn't the first Flash laptop from Sony--my UX390N is all flash and almost a year old. I had to take the stupid restoration partition off the flash drive in order to have enough space to install Microsoft Office.

    An 8GB restore partition on a 32GB SSD (that costed $600 at the time) means that Sony is using $200 of your money to avoid shipping $1 worth of DVD restoration media. Especially when you consider that the vast majority of that 8GB is all the crapware Sony pre-installs--none of it useful.

    --
    aka Matthew at SlashNOT/!
  4. Re:The new oblig. by Dare+nMc · · Score: 5, Informative

    does it run XP?

    http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-list.pl?mdl=VGNTZ190NB&LOC=3
    YES, I was actually surprised.
    Now get bartPE to pair down XP, with openoffice, and firefox to under 1GB, you'll have 31 GB left for data.