So, the main problem I've run across is quite simply the sheer amount of cruft the Sony installs on it to begin with. I'm not just talking about trial versions of software, either.  Trials of Norton, Corel, Naptser, Quickbooks, Office Live, Office 2007, MobiTV, Cingular, and plenty of other preinstalled links and installers are a nice gesture -- but shouldn't they lower costs since they are basically paid advertisements?

In addition to all of that cruft, there a ton of crufty things running.  Counting only those with Sony on in the "Programs and Features" control panel, we find 33 different things installed!  Seriously, though, as a light weight machine in  all asspects, shouldn't it be fairly stripped down?  This is after removing SmartWi, too, as I gave up trying to make it not eat the processor for lunch and, by definition, greatly reduce the battery life.  Although now I've found that SmartWi may have actually been required to turn on the Cingular modem.  Oops.

Speaking of SmartWi, it turns out that it only really hurt battery life.  It apparently ran its processes as low priority services. That means that after uninstalling it didn't improve performance noticably.  There is still a lot to remove, though, that will at least free up some memory for Vista to do it's stuff.

Speaking of performance testing, it has proven a little harder than I had hoped.  PCMark05 Basic only runs at 1024x768 and fails a number of tests when running at 1024x600.  I'll have to run it on an external monitor.  3DMark03 won't install. 3DMark06 is huge, but I got it installed and running for some amusingly low numbers. 

In fact, so far, all of the numbers have been lower than what I've seen elsewhere.  I can't figure out what's up with the GMA 950.  It's reporting that it can only go up to 1400x1050 resolution, yet even with 64MB of shared memory it should be able to do higher.  Also odd is that the benchmark tools report that it's using 32MB or less.  I don't know if it's dynamic or not.  A lot of Mac forums shows that when it has it's full amount of RAM that it can perform up to twice as fast. 

For all the problems, though, it's still a really nice device.

Posted by Shane on March 26, 2007 7:57 AM | Permalink