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Sony Electronics Inc.'s Vaio TZ191N notebook proves that good things do come in small packages. Inside the black carbon-fiber case is an Intel Centrino Duo processor (a 945GMS chip running at 1.2 GHz) with a bus speed of 533 MHz. 2GB DDR2 SDRAM and a double-layer DVD writer. The 11.1-in. WXGA active-matrix TFT color LCD screen (1,366 by 768 resolution) is amazingly sharp and drew oohs and ahhs from colleagues. In terms of size and weight it's a road warrior's dream: It measures 10.9 in wide by 7.8 in deep by 1 in high and weighs in at a mere 2 lb. 10 oz. (with battery) or 3 lb. 6 oz. (if you throw the power cord into your travel bag). What's notable about this almost-weightless workhorse (and what makes its small size possible in part) is that there's no traditional platter-spinning 2.5-in hard drive. Instead. Sony has loaded this laptop with a 32GB Ultra ATA flash drive. Given the drive's lower power demand and its lack of traditional moving parts. I expected cooler and quieter operation long battery life and faster performance. I got it all. The machine runs quiet and cool; there is no mechanical whirring (or other noises) when you're saving a file particularly large Word or PowerPoint files. The only heat comes from the motherboard and it's released through a small vent on the side of the unit. Battery life from the lithium-ion battery is also impressive. I ran the benchmarks once for each of three battery-power settings and then connected the system to AC power to make sure the battery setting didn't greatly influence performance. I enjoyed 3.75 hours of battery life when I used "High Performance" power mode. Power Saver mode as its name implies was stingy with power: It provided almost 5 hours. 35 minutes use and was acceptably fast for word processing and spreadsheet tasks. I found this mode all right for everyday work though slightly sluggish (but still perfectly acceptable) when surfing the Web using the built-in 802.11n wireless (there is no Ethernet port).
Sony claims that you can get up to seven hours using the Power Saver mode but that assumes you'll accept the dim screen display which I found to be too faint for everyday work. Setting the screen to an acceptably brighter level took a toll on battery life but overall I was pleased with having more than five and a half hours of uninterrupted use. A word of warning: By default. Power Saver mode also puts the system into sleep mode after just three minutes of inactivity which then resets the brightness level back to "low" when the system awakes. But you can easily override these settings. Overall. I preferred the setting that Sony uses as the default. In this "Balanced" mode the system provided 4.5 hours of battery life with a bright readable screen that didn't consistently drop into sleep mode. I wondered what kind of performance I'd get from the flash drive. I was pleasantly surprised. I ran Version 2.54 of HD Tune's hard drive benchmarks since my favorite hard drive utility (HD Tach) doesn't have a Vista-compatible version. Testing with 32KB blocks (HD Tune's default) the average transfer rate was 33.6 MB/sec with 0.3msec access time. The drive performed at its best when using 128KB blocks and there was little difference among the three power settings: I measured transfer rates of 48.7 MB/sec for Power Saver mode. 49.5MB/sec for High Performance mode and 50.2MB/sec for Balanced mode all with the same 0.3msec access time. These speeds are quite good when you compare them with 6.5MB/sec for my two-year-old HP Pavilion laptop with a traditional 100GB drive (a Toshiba MK1031GAS). Other benchmark results didn't show such dramatic differences from my traditional hard drive's performance but they were still good. For example. PassMark's PerformanceTest 6.1 showed 19.8MB/sec for sequential reads and 10.8MB/sec for sequential writes; the HP measured 16.6MB/sec and 21MB/sec. respectively. I settled on Balanced mode and found that the system could always keep up with what I was doing whether I was checking my Blockbuster online rental queue sorting a five-page spreadsheet building charts and presentations or resizing graphics. I love the size and weight of the Vaio TZ191N. The 82-key keyboard has a good feel. Keys were in the "right" place and my fingers didn't trip over any of them (though those with larger hands might find it a bit small). There's a lot to like but there are 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. When I bought my HP Pavilion laptop two years ago. 100GB was among the largest storage capacities available and I easily filled it up. These days. 160GB to 250GB is now the upper end. The Sony's 32GB hard drive capacity is tiny by comparison especially when 6GB of that space is taken up by a hidden partition (for system recovery) and still more is taken up by the operating system (Windows Vista Business). The laptop came loaded with lots of trialware (including Norton Internet Security games from Sony. Microsoft Office 2007. Roxio and AOL among others) cluttering the system plus preinstalled software (Works for example). Once I'd jettisoned the software I knew I would never use and loaded the benchmark applications and OpenOffice (which takes less hard disk space than Office 2007). I had 10.2GB left for applications and documents. True. I could always use thumb drives for additional document storage but those drives can be agonizingly slow for reading and writing files of even moderate size such as Word documents of even two or three pages. Ten gig just isn't much to work with. I found the system listed for about $3,100 online. That's a lot to pay for such small capacity especially for road warriors. If your principal needs are e-mail. Web browsing and the occasional memo or small presentation then the portability that the Vaio TZ191N affords may make it a good choice. Its quiet operation makes it a good option for presentations in small quarters. Otherwise you may be better served by other alternatives.
I am sooooo excited about any as it is [ant voice] Tha Fhewtcha [/ant voice]bottom line.. everything will go to "quiet drives" or all SSD no more moving parts for me alltho ill wait till the cost comes down a bit in a year or two to get a laptop for myself.----on a side note for the last two (maybe three) at least years the company i work for has been making all their voice-mails out of flash media we used to have HDD failure after a few years of operation.. now its all flash based for our small - mid sized VM systems its so easy when a system goes down to swap a flash card instead of ship a HDD system back.----
wow... SSD not HDD yeah. 1996 is where your grasp of technology left off.
besides they have a 100G SSD that is working just not consumer ready yet they release things in increments so as to get the product on the market faster this is a HUGE step in the right direction.
wow... SSD not HDD yeah. 1996 is where your grasp of technology left off.
besides they have a 100G SSD that is working just not consumer ready yet they release things in increments so as to get the product on the market faster this is a HUGE step in the right direction.
There ain't no such thing as free tittys. The closest pronunciation of Sinn Féin using "English-sounding" vowels is Shin Fane just call me "S. F." to make it easy.
Yes and No. The USB drive uses a small capacity solid state drive but you're still limited to the 480MB/s data transfer rate that USB 2.0 offers. The drive talked about in this thread will operate much faster with the benefits of being solid state. The cost is the biggest factor being SSD drives are $8/GB compared to $0.25/GB for mechanical drives.
I was reading that they have a 10,000 RPM drive available for public use now that costs $2000 and it gives you a whopping 32 GB of space. Fuck that. Why would anyone release a drive with under 100 GB these days
I was reading that they have a 10,000 RPM drive available for public use now that costs $2000 and it gives you a whopping 32 GB of space. Fuck that. Why would anyone release a drive with under 100 GB these days
I was reading that they have a 10,000 RPM drive available for public use now that costs $2000 and it gives you a whopping 32 GB of space. Fuck that. Why would anyone release a drive with under 100 GB these days
There ain't no such thing as free tittys. The closest pronunciation of Sinn Féin using "English-sounding" vowels is Shin Fane just call me "S. F." to make it easy.
Not everyone needs that much storage that's why. Especially in notebook computers when the unit isn't the only computer the owner has an it's used just for traveling. I've had my laptop for two years now and the 80gb drive still has 24gb of free space. I've got 37gb in my iTunes maybe another 2gb worth of photos and stuff and that's all I've got (or need) on the road. I don't see why you are so pissy about smaller drives. If this Vaio could be brought into the sub-$1000 range with 80gb of space. I'd buy it in a second as my "road computer".
There ain't no such thing as free tittys. The closest pronunciation of Sinn Féin using "English-sounding" vowels is Shin Fane just call me "S. F." to make it easy.
True but down-spec notebooks have their place as traveling machines. That's the way it is in MY house at least... I need a thin-and-light for traveling and have a dex-top here that's more for home use. I'd go for yet another computer for downstairs web-surfing and light photo storage/editing if I could find one that was cheap enough. I used to have just one computer for everything (a so-called "desktop replacement" machine) but those are either too big to travel well or too expensive for my budget. Another use for bottom-rung notebooks is for those who don't want or need a hi-po machine like those who only use it for web surfing... Or for the kids in the house to use.
There ain't no such thing as free tittys. The closest pronunciation of Sinn Féin using "English-sounding" vowels is Shin Fane just call me "S. F." to make it easy.
Not everyone needs that much storage that's why. Especially in notebook computers when the unit isn't the only computer the owner has an it's used just for traveling. I've had my laptop for two years now and the 80gb drive still has 24gb of free space. I've got 37gb in my iTunes maybe another 2gb worth of photos and stuff and that's all I've got (or need) on the road. I don't see why you are so pissy about smaller drives. If this Vaio could be brought into the sub-$1000 range with 80gb of space. I'd buy it in a second as my "road computer".
but 32 gb that won't hardly do anything. Vista alone is 12GB so that leaves 20 and once you get to 75% capacity on a hard drive shit doesn't run the same it gets slow. And I have an 80gb in my PC as my system drive everything else does on my secondary drive. Big diff between 32 GB and 80 GB
There ain't no such thing as free tittys. The closest pronunciation of Sinn Féin using "English-sounding" vowels is Shin Fane just call me "S. F." to make it easy.
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