Episode: 1983
Title: HPR1983: Review of Sony Vaio VPC
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1983/hpr1983.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 12:50:15

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This in HPR Episode 1983 entitled Remew on Sony Mayo VPC, it is hosted by Swift 110 and
in about 34 minutes long, the summary is Sony Mayo is discussed.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com, get 15% discount on all shared hosting
with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Hello, this is Swift 110.
I thought I would go ahead and do a review of a laptop that I got from one of my good friends
back in December of 2015.
You see, as far as wife had this laptop she wasn't using and thought it was cool to give
it to me.
So here I am with this Sony Vio, the specific model is V, is Sony Vio VPC EB 42FM.
And this laptop, I happen to like it quite a bit actually.
It looks like it came out in 2011.
So it is the newest laptop that I actually own, not only because I got it in December,
but also because of when it was manufactured.
You probably aware at this point that I currently own two X201's made by Lenovo Fujitsu
Livebook 4215, I spoke about upgrading that laptop in a earlier recording.
And so I also have a T40 that I hope to be able to bring back from the dead.
We'll see how that goes.
But anyway, today we'll talk specifically about the Sony Vio and what I think about it.
One of the things that stands out immediately is that it has a really big screen.
You know, previous to this, I'm used to having, I'm used to working on a daily basis with
a 12 inch screen.
So 15.6, this is huge.
Not only is it the biggest screen I own in a laptop, but now it's also the best quality
laptop screen that I have.
We're rocking a 1366 by 768.
Currently I am running Linux Mint 17.3, codename Rosa on there.
And this is a dual core machine, Core i3, M380, to be more specific.
And it has four gigs of RAM installed, but it can go up to eight gigs of RAM.
Currently, the hard drive in here is a 5400 RPM hard drive.
And yeah, I know, I know, it's really slow, good grief.
What do you see how long?
It takes to load up, it takes an eternity.
Nonetheless, once it gets started, I find that it does pretty good with everything that
I tend to do on a daily basis.
Now, I talked about screen, the quality is really nice, it's a glossy screen by the way,
which is different from anything else I have.
Everything else I have is pretty much my taste screen.
My taste is also the desktop environment that I have with Linux Mint 17.3.
I like it.
Simple reminds me of No. 2.
And with this version of 17.3, I got my wobbly windows back.
You probably already have seen wobbly windows if you've been in the world of Linux for
any period of time.
You may like them.
You may think they're absolutely stupid, but you know what?
I love wobbly windows.
You hear that?
I love wobbly windows.
So now, the version of my taste that I'm working with is 1.2.0, gdk3.10, very good.
And trying to think of what else?
My hard drive is a 500 gig hard drive, the 5400, so that's not a space available on it.
And looking at version 17.3 of Linux Mint, you see we're still on Upstart.
We're not at System D just yet.
And that's cool.
That's very cool.
I really appreciate having this machine.
I look forward at some point doubling the RAM up to 8.
There's a possibility I'll put another hard drive in here.
A 7200 would actually be quick.
And SSD would be absolutely incredible on this machine, but at the moment, I'm not quite
ready to go ahead and get the SSDs yet for really any of my laptops.
That'll be a future day.
Now, there's several features that this laptop has that I haven't had before.
One is the dedicated Numbers section, the Numbers key rather, you know, that section I could
regular keyboard on a computer where you have your Numbers and whatnot.
That's pretty cool.
It has 3 USB drives, they're all on the right side.
It has the headphone jack and your sound input.
Those things are actually on the front of the case.
The only thing about this machine is that the trackpad is a bit wonky, but besides that
pretty good.
I'm able to overcome the trackpad issue because I plug in a mouse.
So that solves it.
I find that I prefer using a mouse to the trackpad anyway, even though I'm used to using
the trackpad that comes with the original X201 that I got first.
The other X201 doesn't have a trackpad, I just use the trackpoint as a mouse function.
And that works out really well as well.
It's a black laptop, definitely consumer grade, not built to be especially rugged like
my Lenovo and the IBM laptop that I have are on the right side, there's several ports.
One of them is a VGA port that allows me to connect to an external drive, an external
monitor, a screen, and I use that pretty often.
I have an HDMI port, I have this little, I have this little, this other thing here called
East SATA, I've never used that, but apparently that can be used for extra storage and I have
an express card slot on here as well.
I have a connector also on the left side of the laptop for Ethernet connection and there's
my power port on the back, there's nothing because it's a bit of a clam, it's a clamshell
design.
Now going back to the right side, I mentioned earlier, there's three USB ports and the
optical drive are there as well as the Kensington lock.
Very nice, something else that's unique about this machine, it apparently has something
called, it can do like a wireless display or whatever and I seem to have forgotten where
I remember seeing mention of that, goodness, hold on, forget where stuff is, looking, I thought
one of the ports had something that would be helpful.
Fans also on the left, as you can hear it's not loud, I would never say this is a loud
laptop, I use it pretty often, lately I've been having issues with other laptops, so this
model I've kind of got in the spoil with the screen, you know, having this big screen,
even though the laptop itself is six pounds, then you have to add the power adapter that
goes to it and it's pretty good amount of weight much heavier than my X2 awards, but at
the same time, I love this screen real estate, you don't realize how much you benefit from
having a bigger screen, until you have something that has a decent size screen, now I forgot
about that wireless display thing, so what I'm just going to do is look it up, so Sony
VIO, the model number is VPC, B42, FM, that's the model we're working with here, okay, so
now what I want to know, I'm seeing different types of drivers, different people, what they
think about it, the color of the laptop by the way is called the Gunmetal Black, it's a 15
and a half inch screen, yeah, I mentioned earlier, it's an Intel Core i3 380M processor, thankfully
it's a 64 bit dual core, and it's operating at 2.54 GHz, it uses 35 watts of power, that explains
why the battery life is some garbage, my battery life, let's see, right now I'm at 99% charge,
unplugged that for a moment, and it says I have a whopping two hours and 37 minutes,
it's a lie, so you know, so I was just going to plug that in, a little bit above,
so that it actually registers as literally a hundred percent, and that was pretty much,
that's pretty much decent there, I have Intel HD graphics with 64 megabytes to
1,696 megabytes dynamically allocated shared graphics memory, so it does good with that,
now if you want to play today's games at their highest resolutions, this is what I was talking about
before, this laptop also features Intel wireless display technology, now I would love the fine way
to put that to use, that would be absolutely fantastic, so we'll see how we'll be able to get that one,
now I also, turns out, oh I forgot to look at the front of this laptop,
when the front of the laptop, what we have here is your on and off switch for wireless, there's
hard switch for wireless, turn that on and off, you have, I have an hard time reading it because
of the color, you have a world, something, H, something about some magic gate, it says HD, Duo,
HD, something, magic gate, now where else is a magic gate, then there's an SD card slot next to that,
I think that's pretty cool, you know what I'm going to go ahead and try the SD card,
I actually haven't had one here, see if it works, okay so I put in the SD card, does it show up,
no sir, okay, so you want to play, it's okay, not worried about it,
something else I appreciate about this laptop is that it has the DVD drive, not even just
it can read DVDs or CDs but it can also write DVDs as well, that's really useful,
for networking, oh goodness gracious, so for wireless support I get two options,
the standard 802.11 ABG and Wi-Fi adapter, there's also a 4G Y-Mex adapter which requires an
additional subscription to use, the VIO also has support for Bluetooth integrated stereo,
2.1 plus enhanced data rate, whatever that is, I got an I'm, I got a motion I webcam with
microphone, so I want to use that, doubt I'll use it much, external ports, I mentioned
them already but there's a one express card 34 slot, one HDMI output port, one headphone jack,
one microphone input, that's what I meant to say earlier, four USB 2.0 ports, one VGA output
port and one ESAIDA port, four USB ports, maybe I'm just slow but I only see three,
so, somebody's got some splendid, there are only three USB ports, so talk about faulty information
guys, I would love for there to be four, USB ports, three, three is typical,
and three is company two basically, thing weighs six pounds, and when the battery is new,
four and a half hours, I can tell you now, I'm battery new, the thing has been used,
in use for the last five years, so my battery life is late, an hour and a half, two hours maybe,
understandable, it's a really old battery, what do you expect? That's why I'm not doing any shade on
no reason to, it's a decent machine as is, and one of the things I like doing with my laptops,
something I'm able to do is using an application called INXI, I can use INXI when I'm in,
for example, INXI is useful if you're in the terminal, in fact, I'll go ahead and do that now,
go in applications, go to terminal, and type in INXI, there we go, very well done,
currently this machine is on 4.2 kernel, the Linux kernel 4.2, that's proven to be problematic,
so what I'm going to do is go back to 3.19, and just rock with it that way, that's,
I think good enough, and if you're in IRC by the way, internet relay chat, some of you guys
will likely be aware of IRC, I can type in forward slash EXEC, then there's a space INXI
in another space, and you know what, it'd be easier for me to just do it,
because the whole imperfection thing means I don't always remember everything,
so like I said, 4 slash EXEC, space INXI, and then, let me see, yeah,
oh goodness, I can do it right did it, I only did a capital F after that in xxx,
but that's not going to give me my full amount of information on your, so let's try that again,
shall we slash EXEC, INXI, dash FXX, and make sure the F is capitalized, and the X is
our lowercase, everything else is lowercase, ah, there we go, and it gives you all these details
about the laptop that you may normally have to look up on the internet for, I absolutely love it,
let me see if I can do the same thing in the terminal, so suppose I do INXI,
now here's something I want to share with you, INXI, apparently in out test this theory,
you only do the slash EXEC when you're in IRC, if you're just on your terminal, just straight INXI,
let's say dash F, the same thing, and by the being by the boom, you got it, all right, so let's see
if I can expand this view here, like a boss, look at this, very good, my BIOS date is January the
28th, 2011, so I know this is not a new machine at all, but you know what, I've been using it every day
for like a week and a half, so I know that it's a really good machine, and I'm very happy that
I was able to get this, so thanks Mr. It, I'll be sure to put a good word to Wilbur for you,
yeah, you probably thought that was lame, guess what, don't care, oh let's see, what was I,
ah, was looking for something earlier, oh, like a boss, I'm good to go,
so I'm able to have different ways to have all the details about this particular laptop
in front of me, copy paste, whatever you want to do with it, very happy,
in the future, what I can do to upgrade, at some point I'll likely get another battery,
it's not necessary now, considering whether or not I'll go to a standard hard drive, say to hard drive
in here, or if I'm going to actually go the full jump and actually go to team SSD,
I'm not sure exactly when I'm going to do that, or whether or not that's going to be something I do,
there's definitely an idea, it's for sure, I do look forward to what I definitely plan on doing,
certainly plan on doing is going four eight gigs of RAM in this laptop,
that would be fantastic, so maybe this laptop doesn't have the same
power as my X201, that one's rocking in i5 processor, also 2.54,
so this one doesn't exactly have the power of it, but it has a bigger screen,
it has a slightly better quality screen,
and I really, I really appreciate this laptop, and I don't think that I can really
say that too many times at this point, it's proven to be a very good addition to
my family of laptops, which very likely is going to grow as time passes by, now that I have this
large screen laptop, now that I have this, I noticed that it's really good when I'm pulling
of maps, or from using GAM, blender, I really like this added real estate, it's so nice, yes,
I can get a bigger screen, and then connected via an external monitor,
but when I'm on the go, I'm not going to exactly carry another monitor with me, that's ridiculous,
so, although I've seen it, I've seen that, where someone brought an entire all-in-one PC to
some French little restaurant thing that WiFi, and it was just kind of crazy, and I'm not that,
I'm not on that level, let's just say that, I probably could bring my old PC somewhere that has
WiFi, and just use it, and rock with it from there, but who wants to carry that thing around?
I mean, really, that's probably like 20 pounds, I'm already crazy for carrying around an X201,
and this Sony VIO, which weighs 6 pounds by itself, and I already talked about what's in my bag
in a previous recording, so no need for me to really go into detail about that,
but I'm really, I like looking at maps, I'm really in the geography, and pictures just really pop
on the screen, it's just really nice having this, when you go from such a small screen,
you know, and just keep in mind that it was only about two years ago that my main laptop
was the Fujitsu Lifebook 4215, great laptop, by the way, and I really like the 4x3 aspect ratio,
that's awesome, that's cool, I do prefer it, because I don't feel like the screen is so short,
I'm okay with this other aspect ratio, because it's a bigger screen, but a 12 inch laptop,
a 16 x 10 aspect ratio just seems short to me, so I would only be even more irritated with a 16.9
aspect ratio, because you're telling me I'm getting less horizontal pixels, yes, it matters to me,
you know, when I watch movies using my laptop, generally I'm going to do that when I'm home,
and I connect it to an external monitor anyway, so if I'm going to connect it to a much larger monitor,
then at that point, the size of the laptop honestly does not matter, this is mostly more convenient
when I'm on a go, it was like some trade-offs, yes, this is way heavier, but it gives me the
advantage of having this big screen, and now that this advantage of course is the battery life,
because it eats the battery, surprises, doing as well as it now, because earlier it was just
chomping, chomping, chomping at the battery life, like Pac-Man, I'm going to have to get in here
and see what can be done, I'm really thinking that this lens kernel 4.2 that we're not ready for that yet,
and Beyonce songs popped in my head, and you could probably figure out what song it is, I'm not
going to be more specific about that, I have no pride in that, I think what to say to be honest with you,
I have one here, pretty much the same programs that I generally have on my laptops,
couple games, an education section, cage geography, yes, it's a program one here,
where you have the countries of the world, you can explore the map, you can test yourself
locations of countries, as many questions as you want, up to 178, place countries in the map,
countries by capital, capitals of countries, countries by flag, flags of countries,
I'll give you a case of point, location of countries,
let's say for example, I want to go to,
why am I doing this, making this, being stupid right now, I want to go to the United States here,
in this case, and I don't understand, what am I doing is different from what I normally do,
I know, oh, there it is, you click on open map, and there you choose a map to use,
so let's say for example, I want to go to Venezuela, what I have in front of me is a list of all the
provinces or states that are located in this particular country, so I can choose that,
and now my option is, in Venezuela by itself, I can explore the map,
and it tells you the name of each state in the country of Venezuela, I just picked the random
country by the way, and it gives you, it even names islands, well, it doesn't name islands,
it's just this water, if you click on any of the islands, it's kind of funny,
so a couple of the states in Venezuela is Amazonas, that's all all the way in extreme far south
Amazonas, who gee, I wonder why it's called Amazonas because it's close to the Amazon,
it borders the eastern section of Colombia and the northwestern chunk of Brazil,
in the southeast corner of Venezuela's Bolivar, just a couple of states in Venezuela,
just a little bit of here, I'm going to give more, I'm going to talk more about this another time,
and I got carried away, I don't even know what I'm doing this, I have no idea,
what's my intention, I got carried away because I really like cage geography,
other programs I have, I have another one called marble, like marble, I play with marbles,
and this one is maps, and I absolutely, it's a virtual globe, so it's really nice,
a program, trying to click out of it, doesn't want to let me go, I'm able to take screenshot
whenever, if you're in Windows, you just press print screen, duh, or just saying,
wait, Linux, okay, fine, whatever, I'll do it right now, butta being butta boom,
meant to, I got my USB image writer, USB stick formator, I got virtual box on here,
but since I'm limited to a four gigs, I can only use so big a virtual machine here,
now a program I found out a few months ago, it's called QGIS, and that's a GIS program,
geographical information systems, probably getting it all wrong, that's on here, I have some
games such as Lin City, which is a clone of Sim City, mine test is a clone of Minecraft,
Pingas is on here, super tux 2, super tux carts, torques, which is a racing game, triggers a racing
game, unknown horizon, is a good simulation game as well, now graphics programs, I have the
Gimp on here, Credo, Scribus, stuff for scanners, sweet home 3D, I don't use most of these programs,
a lot, I have them on here because I intend to learn them, it just takes me a while to kind of
get to things and really get my hands on them and become quite proficient in them, so I'm going
to be amazing, all set and done team viewers on here, that came in handy, and I find that really
good LibreOffice caliber, heavy word, blender is on here, a lot of different programs, I gave
cheese the program another chance on here, likely I'll do a review of that, see how far we've come,
since I talked about it back in 2012, talked about it, April 2012, and I just wasn't feeling it,
my word, some garbage, and looking at myself, boy is that crystal clear, with my hands on there guy,
mine if I do, see here taking pictures, look at this, yay, take the glasses off, take the glasses off,
man I can't see the tag, I know there we go, and we're off, okay that's cool, it's okay,
but around with that, apparently it works better on this machine than it did on my Fujitsu
lifebook, order 215, I'll let you boy, so we go to net, out of different programs,
and what not that I'll be delving into at a future time, more and more as time passes by,
and you know what I've been talking about good period of time, oh what to do, 32 minutes, almost
33, pretty much, I'm still learning my way around some of the features on this laptop,
one of the things that I need to do is get another audio cable, because what I use as an external
monitor on here, believe it, you see there are 17 inch or 19 inch LCD TV, I use that as an external
monitor, and that is really good, I don't think I would have pictures show up in two places,
I can shut down on the laptop, I can do what I want with that pretty good, so that's all good,
very proud of that, I forgot what I meant to say though, I meant to say something else
about this laptop, and you know what, if I think of something I'll just talk about it at another time,
so thank you guys for listening, we'll have a great day, goodbye!
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