I've watched a video about PCG-GT1 a while ago, which also came with Transmeta CPU... except that thing was basically portable live streaming machine with a built-in camcorder. Yeah... live video encoding on Transmeta. It also supports fancy video effects that will probably melt down the CPU. That thing also had the same jogwheel and capture button, which was essential part of the machine given that it was more like a camcorder running Windows ME than a PC.
Apologies for the slow reply! Joys of life getting in the way. Yeah those effects hahaha, She's a slow machine for sure! the jog wheel is pretty cool, not going to lie even if it is a bit clunky to use
Always loved these little sony laptops.. my first personal laptop was a 10" SR-17 from the same era.. Also shipped with Win ME so seeing some of this software again was cool. IIRC it ran at 550 or 700MHZ, could downclock for battery savings. Also featured 128mb of ram and a 20gb drive. Had the same "DVD-51" external drive as well! Many late nights on that thing after "bedtime" back in middle school lol. I always thought of these picturebooks as the OG P series. I also remember one being featured in the godzilla movie that came out while the thing was current.. Need that sleek tech product placement lol.
Wow that would have been a fancy but expensive laptop to have back in the day! I wish there were more of these machines kicking around these days, as they're something else.
It was actually relatively inexpensive for the time.. Think I paid around $600 for it secondhand on ebay. It would have been two-3 years old at the time. I REALLY wanted the srx-27 but 13 year old me wasn't gonna save the $1500 for one. My parents had agreed to split the cost of. alaptop with me and the sr17 seemed like a fair compromise. It was fairly underpowered for the time but I still got a lot of use out of the thing, Upgraded it to winXP Pro sp2, eventually stuck a WiFi card in the thing, ect. Good times!@@thesmokingcap
I have a Series 2, Series 3 and a Series 4. All have ssd's Get the cheapest 128GB sata ssd you can find from a brand you trust-ish, take it apart, the board inside is significantly smaller than the 2.5" enclosure. Now get a sata to 44pin ide convertor [a horizontal/inline one], put the bare ssd in one end, 'tother end in your picturebook, and hey presto ! It fits ! Helps a lot with speed and reliability.
Wow! You have the collection going there. What one is your favorite? I have found some MSata enclosures that are in the 2.5" size. So could throw one of those in
Great video on this little Vaio laptop! Honestly, I was surprised at the quality of the webcam. There are laptops that use 720p webcams, and they really don’t look much better then that. It’s too bad about the CPU; if you hadn’t said something, I would have thought that the slowdown with certain applications was caused by the mechanical hard drive.
Thank you! Yeah the camera isn't too bad! I was surprised that it outputs a somewhat decent frame rate. CPU is really weak but good enough for a portable note taking device. But not exactly cheap to buy into!
I have one lying around somewhere, under XP (or xp pro?). Not sure if that was the OG OS. Bought it second hand around 2008 from a colleague, but got no CDs nor cables except for the power supply. But the price was good. Beautiful screen. But that's about it. Lackluster performance indeed. Mine also has loose hinges and I still haven't gotten around fixing that. But between that and the lack of cables such as VGAand with only 1 USB port, I'm not sure I'd even enjoy using it :)
I believe the newer ones still use the Transmeta CPUs. With windows XP that will feel really slow. Its sad you didn't get the disks as those are hard to find. But at least they're a cool little laptop that is good enough for portable note taking
Regarding the recovery issues. ---- EDIT: Did a test in VirtualBox, and the recovery checks the machine it runs on. Also it expects to run from Q:, so USB drive doesn't work since it becomes C:. The best option (aside from swapping the original CD drive as you mentioned) might be to modify the recovery discs to use a generic CD driver and the booting from a USB CD drive using a PLOP Boot Manager floppy to boot it. Then create an image of the fresh recovered HDD. ---- What can sometimes work is running the recovery CD in VirtualBox. At least the first stage where it copies everything to the HDD. Then you move the HDD from VirtualBox to the PC and continue from there. You can convert a virtual HDD to a real raw HDD image that you can write on a real HDD. Or you can mount a real HDD directly into VirtualBox using createrawvmdk (I created a Java GUI for it named "VBox Raw Disk GUI"). ---- Another option is to create a DOS bootable USB stick if you can get the PC to boot from USB (PLOP boot manager floppy?). Say you use a Windows 98SE PC with the USB mass storage patch installed. Then you can in Windows use fdisk and then "format X: /s" (X being the USB drive letter). Copy all files from the CD and start setup manually? The CD contains a folder and file named "[BOOT]/Boot-1.44M.img", that is what the CD boots (basically a Windows boot disk). You can see there how it starts the recovery, you might be able to use that to create a USB boot disk for instance. I have dabbeled in these kind of things myself. :-P
Thanks for checking that out! As I was really curious to see what sort of disk protection or setup it is using. I wonder if I try to boot the disks up on another PC or machine to see if it will install. Then image that over to a fresh drive for the laptop. I'll have to have a play sometime
@thesmokingcap To summarize so far. 1. The recovery will only work on original hardware unless someone modifies the file "SONY/INSTALL4.EXE". 2. I have created 2 different recovery alternatives. They are linked in a review on your archive page linked in the description. - I modified CDs where the CD-rom driver is replaced with the one from the Windows 98SE Boot Disk. But I don't think it will work, hehe. My thought was using a USB CD drive and booting using PLOP boot manager on a floppy disk. - I created a USB/HDD image that will let you run the recovery from a USB stick, again booting from a floppy with PLOP boot manager. I have modified the "SONY/INSTALL4.EXE" file with a HEX editor and replaced Q: with C: for isntance as booting from a USB stick with DOS makes the USB stick C:, and the internal HDD becomes D:. I have written a readme on the HDD image. All images boot, but the copy protection stops me from testing the recovery process itself. 🙂
First thought was 'Looks cool.. hope it's not a Transmeta CPU ..and it was lmao. Talk about ahead of their time, would love this format with a great AMD APU and 16 gigs of ram.
Sadly the CD rom is still faulty. I've got some other units to try and swap in. Not sure if Sony have locked the firmware down to the one inside of the caddy. But haven't had much luck swapping unit with some Toshiba ones
I am so freakin' tired of Sony, Sony Vaio, and everything Sony. Their computers, tv's, and soundbars are stupid, counter-intuitive, overpriced, and hard to deal with. Not better is worse.
I've got a sony 52" 1080tv from ~2008.. It's got a decent picture, fine TV for playing stuff in the background. Idk, Got it for free. I also bought a sony bluetooth speaker several years back that still sees regular use. sounds good, still holds a good charge.. can be used as a powerbank.. I'm happy with the purchase. I owned several VAIOs back in the early and mid 2000s though and looking back, they were pretty trash. Did their job but wouldn't do again. Even back then, finding all of the right drivers after upgrades was ass. They also used funky ram and the bundled sony bloat software was always junk
