Sony VAIO G Series Review

I upgraded to SP1 yesterday, everything seems ok. I am travelling, have no time for testing but did not find any issues so far (sound and display ok). Will report back when I have had more time to test.

 

Thanks for the update.

John

 

Here an update of boot times with updated OS (until WPA encrypted wireless connection shown working).
Before upgrades:
Vista: 1m50s, XP Pro: 1m30s, Ubuntu 7.10: 1m20s
After upgrades:
Vista SP1: 2m00s, XP Pro SP3: 1m00s, Ubuntu 8.04: 1m20s

XP with SP3 has become much faster than Vista and Ubuntu now.
With Vista, even after the wireless connection comes up, startup processes seem to continue (CPU and harddisk activity) which makes Vista slow everytime I boot it.
So no speed improvement for Vista SP1 on my machine, but no issues with drivers observed either.

 

Useful info. There is probably scope to speed up both Vista and XP by further tweaking. SP1 for Vista seems to be more of bug-fixing and less of tweaking.

Vista's continuing CPU and HDD activity after startup is probably SuperFetch at work. Vista is pre-loading files you might need into spare RAM so that they then load faster. I see the benefit of this caching and avoid the cost by using hibernation between sessions.

John

 

Hi guys,

l am from Australia, l will have two questions can u help me?
1) I am considering to buy g11 but not sure. U said that in UK it is aroud 860euro whic is around US$1340 , I find one here it is US$ 1900, there is US$450 differnce between the prices u telling. is it a good deal to pay $1900 for g11?? and do you know where i can find cheper??

2) I cant decide between Assus U1E and G11, U1E have core 2 due 1.06Ghz processor and 2 GB memory, g11 has solo 1.33Ghz. and 1 memory,Is that make huge difernce..Between i am not in the gameing but dont want to have very slow one. U1E is also 1 kg but have 11 " screen, and is cheaper, it is $1600

Cheers..

 

The G11 has disappeared from the shelves in UK and the follow-on G21 (with fual core CPU) failed to arrive. The last of the G11s were cleared out for £823 (British pounds, not Euros) but the normal price was at least 50% more. The G21 is available in Germany at notebook.de and the cost is €1839.

It would be better to compare the Asus U1 with the Sony TZ since their displays are similar. The G11 / G21 has a bigger display with bigger pixels (too big, IMO, something like 1200 x 900 resolution would have been very good). If your eyes are young then the 11.1" WXGA may be fine, but I know my eyes can't handle it. Another possible alternative is the Zepto Notus (see thread in the Zepto forum). 12.1" screen light weight and long battery life. However, the CPU is slow and the RAM seems to be fixed at 1GB. There's also a nice Toshiba ultraportable (R500) but it's very pricy.

John

 

Great review! Wow @ the battery life.

 

thanks for quick respond, also is there very big difference between core duo and solo in this laptops, is G11 fast enough?

 

If there are two or more processes fighting over CPU time then two cores are better than one. If it's a single-threaded process which can only use one core then you won't see much speed difference.

The trade-off is battery life. The extra transistors in the second core invariably leak some power and the dual core G21 loses a couple of hours of run time. If you don't need the absolute longest battery time then dual core is smoother in usage.

John

 

Hello,

Now I've bought Japanese G1 and it has the quality of display like it's on Dell D400, it's like old models TN+film, angels are very bad. I'm very depressed about it. Does anybody knows about displays on G2 models? Are they Ok? Do they use new TN+film or maybe MVA or it's like G1 displays?

 

I don't know the detailed technology of my G11's display except that it has got LED backlighting. In my opinion the overall quality is good, because of the powerful backlight, but the viewing anges are average.

John

 

Does anybody have or know where to get the part number for the Bezel to replace the ODD drawer (optical dvd drive) for the G series, either G2 or G1? I want to take out the dvd drive and replace it with the bezel. Thanks.

 

the G2 flies on Windows 7

 

Could you be a bit more specific?
I installed Windows 7 as well, and it is a lot faster than Vista, but had not the time to do any meausurements and compare it to XP SP3.

Cheers,
stroom

 

I'm very happy with XP SP3. Much faster than Vista SP1.

 

Same for me, I am satisfied with XP3 on the G11, but wanted to test Windows 7 just for fun. Vista is workable but remains slow compared to XP or Linux Mint or Ubuntu.

stroom

 

man iso what a way to bring back an ancient topic

 

Hi there,

Has anyone tried to disassemble his VAIO G ? I want to replace the HD but it's like I can't even remove the palmrest.
Thank you