Wednesday, 18 May 2011
Changing VAIO SB Series RAM
The vaio SB series (my review is here) comes with 4GB installed RAM and a single slot. Yes, I found only one slot on opening the back panel, it seems the pre-installed RAM is on-board. I'm not complaining though, the maximum this machine can work with is 8GB and 1 free slot is perfect. In fact its a lot less irritating that most machines that have 2 slots, but put in 2 2GB RAM modules; what a waste. I added another 4GB Corsair 1333 MHz SO-DIMM module; works really well. The amount Windows 7 can do with 8 GB RAM is simply amazing, on OS X I was always running out of RAM even when I had 8 GB installed.
Saturday, 7 May 2011
Sony Vaio SB Series Review
I just bought a new Sony Vaio SB series laptop, the VPCSB17GG. It comes with a Sandy Bridge Core i5 processor, 4 GB RAM and a 500 GB hard drive. Detailed specs are available here and an exhaustive review is available here. I just thought I'd share my initial impressions.
This is the first non Apple computer I have purchased in 5-6 years. I needed a Windows machine and have been having just a terrible experience with Apple's hardware lately. My 21.5 inch iMac for example keeps getting burn marks and dust behind the glass and I'm absolutely sick of sending it in for servicing. Hence the VAIO, otherwise I probably would have bought another MacBook Pro and installed Windows on it.
I've only been using the machine for a few days, and I quite like it. Out of box experience was a bit trashy and I had to manually un-install a lot of bloat ware. Some if it still remains, like the TrueSuite finger print crap. Other than that the restore disk creation etc. went smoothly and was not an issue.
The hardware is nice but I don't like the screen. I mean its alright, maybe I'm not used to matte screens any more but the viewing angles of this thing are definitely not good. I had read on a few forums that fan noise is a problem, its not for me and I compile 50 thousand line code bases in Visual Studio 2010 all day long and it works really well. I really, really, really like the keyboard. The track pad is smooth and I'm actually beginning to prefer the edge based single finger scrolling over the MacBook's two finger method. The build quality of the machine is good and it doesn't heat up unlike some of the MacBooks I've owned.
Over all I am quite happy with it.
This is the first non Apple computer I have purchased in 5-6 years. I needed a Windows machine and have been having just a terrible experience with Apple's hardware lately. My 21.5 inch iMac for example keeps getting burn marks and dust behind the glass and I'm absolutely sick of sending it in for servicing. Hence the VAIO, otherwise I probably would have bought another MacBook Pro and installed Windows on it.
I've only been using the machine for a few days, and I quite like it. Out of box experience was a bit trashy and I had to manually un-install a lot of bloat ware. Some if it still remains, like the TrueSuite finger print crap. Other than that the restore disk creation etc. went smoothly and was not an issue.
The hardware is nice but I don't like the screen. I mean its alright, maybe I'm not used to matte screens any more but the viewing angles of this thing are definitely not good. I had read on a few forums that fan noise is a problem, its not for me and I compile 50 thousand line code bases in Visual Studio 2010 all day long and it works really well. I really, really, really like the keyboard. The track pad is smooth and I'm actually beginning to prefer the edge based single finger scrolling over the MacBook's two finger method. The build quality of the machine is good and it doesn't heat up unlike some of the MacBooks I've owned.
Over all I am quite happy with it.
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