Even before I finished writing yesterdays post about the performance of various micro PCs, I picked up a Sony Vaio VGN-UX390N to try out.  Naturally, I finished up the post yesterday with it.  It's an absolutely wonderful device.

However, there is one critical problem that I have to solve before I can really dive in to test it and put it through it's paces.  Sony ships their laptops that have WLAN and WWAN connections with something called SmartWi.  Supposedly, this is to "seamlessly" transition between WiFi and cellular networks.  However, right after a boot -- and never stopping after that -- the various processes that make up this application suite -- and there are eight of them that show up in the process list -- all are using varying bits of processor from about 1% to 20% in the case of "PowerManager.exe." 

This means that at any given time the CPU usage is hanging out at around 40-50% -- without doing anything!  That will seriously harm performance so I have to solve that first.  From doing some searches, there are at least a few other people that experience this problem.  Since I do want to give the Cingular stuff a trial since they offer 30 days free, I figure I probably need the application to work for the best experience, but maybe not.

So, until that is solved, I won't be doing any benchmarks or other forms of testing.

Posted by Shane on March 23, 2007 8:00 AM | Permalink