I was disappointed to learn yesterday that spending $900.00USD for a Sony Vaio P netbook/notebook only buys you blown chunks as you try to pick up the limits of your life after assuming the Vaio P would actually be a usable computer.  It is not.


I was enticed into buying the Vaio P because of it’s tiny portable size.  I wanted something quick and fast for doing down and dirty surfing and writing along the corridors of my life beyond the home office tether.

I loved the Vaio P’s 1.4 pounds, SD slot, HG-Duo Stick slot, 2 gigs of memory, 8-inch 1600×768 display, metallic green (you can buy several colors) shell and it’s built-in camera.

The disappointing downside for the Vaio P series are of an unrecoverable magnitude:  The Slow Dog Windows Vista Home, awful stickmouse pointer, a 60 gig HDD that arrives with less than 20 gigs available, a horrible, terrible, monstrously slow 1.33GHz Intel® processor that takes you back to your CP/M Kaypro 2x days, and a ridiculous offer of $60.00USD a month for 5 gigs of Verizon broadband bandwidth a month that ruins the neatness-cool-factor of the embedded Gobi broadband chip.

I spent the day yesterday enlarging the default font, removing all the Microsoft Office cruft and upgrading Windows Vista with something like 35 “urgent” updates.  I now have around 26 gigs free on my hard drive and I wonder if the 128 gig SSD option would have been faster or slower than the current drive option.

I have decided the Vaio P is only good for web surfing.  Using the Google Chrome internet browser and a Bluetooth mouse makes the Vaio P a usable “netbook” — even though my Logitech V470 Bluetooth Cordless Laser Mouse is a third of the size of the Vaio P!

If you’re looking for a netbook — Apple seems to think we don’t want a netbook even though we do — you’ll have to settle for a Windows box and the soon-to-be-unleashed ASUS Eee PC 1000HE 10-Inch Netbook is looking pretty good to me now, and the fact that it sells for around a third of the price of the Vaio P is disjointedly alarming. 

I hope Windows 7 will run better than Windows Vista on my chunks-blowing Sony Vaio P.

11 Comments

  1. Disappointed because i read so much about this, david. Why would sony put out such a bad machine? It’s the perfect size for a purse.

  2. Tell me about it, Anne! I’m seething just a wee bittle bit.ly now! It’s is a precious machine. Darling, even. It looks great. Has great promise. It’s just buttt-assss sloooooooow. Is it Vista or the awful processor?

  4. That’s a good question, Anne, I haven’t tried yet. I have the big battery — just delivered — charging now and that looks so much better than the tiny bundled battery. Then I’ll back up everything on my USB DVD and then I’ll plunge into typing something.

  5. Sounds like I might have to take it off your hands, david. I have all the time in the world.

  7. I wonder how much it would be enhanced to get XP installed on it or a ubuntu operating system? Oh, how I don’t like vista.

  8. That’s a good question, Gordon. Even the Windows 7 beta would run better, I think. The problem is, I don’t know what happens to all my special Sony Vaio P software. If it gets backed up and I can reinstall it only without Vista, then things might get better soon.

  9. Sony Vio sucks. I am talking about the regular one, had one from office – it’s slower than a tortoise – I just gave up.
    No wonder the miniature one is also slow, I feel for you David!

  10. Hi Katha —
    I had a small Sony laptop several years ago. It wasn’t too bad. The design is always great, but the innards are always hamstrung in some strange and awful way that makes the machine super slow.
    I have turned off all power saving features on the Vaio P and now, with my fast WiFi connection and the Google Chrome browser, the unit is acceptable enough as an emergency “netbook” and typing on the thing isn’t too bad. Sigh…
    What computer do you have in hand now for your office work?

  11. Vaio P is much better under the Win 7 beta than Vista.
    Putting Vista on the machine instead of WinXP was a fatal flaw for Sony.
    I used the public beta disk for Win 7 and did a straight upgrade install. It took about 2 hours but the process was straight forward and flawless.
    Win 7 is snappier, better behaved, and slicker than Vista could ever hope to be.
    Why did MSFT provide such a horrendous pox upon us?

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